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© 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA
THE MAGAZINE EXHIBITIONS
Fashion in Europe history in its own fashion
Fashion, like painting, reflects the world. The
industrious development of skills merges
with a history of people, where forms often
illustrate the societies that invent them.
Through a sensual relationship between
fabrics and movement, the couturier's eye captures
lifestyles in a silhouette. He proposes them, fixes their
ephemeral contours, and delineates their impression.
Like a painter, he illustrates their spirit, too, and lays
down the colours of a particular time. The garment, a
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fragile everyday item and the sociological and aesthetic
witness of an epoch, becomes the expression of a civilisation.
The LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
understood this a long time ago, and has been adding
historical clothing to its collections since 1915, even
before its first paintings. And now, after a stopover in
Berlin, the institution is presenting a collection of
remarkable outfits and accessories built up over fifty
years by two antique dealers and collectors of ancient
fabrics: Martin Kamer from London, and Wolfgang Ruf
from Switzerland.
Reality transcended
A circuit like a long, winding ribbon, dreamed up by
stage designer Frédéric Beauclair, gradually unfolds the
development of silhouettes. In simple, almost invisible
display cases, these set up a comparison and a dialogue,
like a conversation between models of all ages, which
the visitor is invited to join in. Displayed with skilfully
reflected viewpoints, we see around a hundred pieces
plucked from two centuries of design between 1700
and 1915. Like a family tree, this journey through time
reveals the association between forms, from late Louis
XIV sack-back gowns with their scalloped ruffle sleeves
to the fluid, slender forms of Paul Poiret worn up to the
middle of the First World War. Like an immobile fashion
show, this scholarly and even elitist panorama, though it
may lack solid, explicit points of reference, reveals the
predominance of French fashion in Europe through
Turban, Paul Poiret, worn by Denise Poiret
for the "Thousand and second night" party, 1911.