Fashioning Fashion

Fashioning Fashion, an exhibition dedicated to two centuries of sartorial history (1700-1915), first organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is the current must-see at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

The richness and thoroughness of the collection is impressive : embroideries, lace, sequins, crinolines and trains - all is meant to make you feel just how amazingly imaginative clothes once were. Yes, there used to be a time when nothing was too good, too shiny, too precious to make you stand out in the crowd.

As usual with the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the exhibition quickly turns into a display of power. It is fine to just stare in awe at all these beauties. Or you can also test your fashion culture and try to draw links with today's fashion and its use of past references (and realize that what we call « couture » is just a faint echo of yesterday's unchecked creative frenzy).

But there is another level to the exhibition – one that has more to do with a disturbing metaphysical shock. At some point, you may very well be seized by a feeling of melancholy and estrangement : these clothes were made some two hundred years ago – which is not that much on the scale of History. And yet, people then had preoccupations that are painfully unfathomable to us. 

Who were these people, who felt the imperious need to wear such absurd contraptions as bustles? Our perception of their daily concerns, of their aspirations, of what made their lives so different from ours can only be vague and grossly inaccurate. We live in a world where the words « comfort » and « functionality » have an actual meaning – but it has not always been so. How did their world turn into ours? What is it that changed us so dramatically, so irrevocably, that we finally decided against crinolines and stomachers? To what superior motives did we sacrifice our ancestors' taste for ornament? The exhibition, stopping its course in 1915, deliberately leaves room for personal interpretation.

But another question soon arises : how long till we, too, become museum pieces? In a not-so-distant future, people will visit our wardrobes with the same half-impressed, half- amused feeling, considering us romantic oddities, chuckling with embarrassment at the way we wore our sleeves, our shoes, our hair. One day we too will become part of a mythical era, veiled in mystery, as unattainable for the spectator as some sort of quaint  Atlantis. In that respect, Fashioning Fashion is the kind of exhibition that is not just entertaining – it makes you feel small, and hopefully, grow a little wiser.

This article was written by Anais, an editor and jewelry designer.