Saturday, September 22, 2012

Impressionism and Fashion

A new exhibit. According to The Wall Street Journal:
The Paris version, called "Impressionism and Fashion," starts Sept. 25 and ends Jan. 20. It features 74 paintings, 37 period costumes, a range of fashion illustrations and such accessories as shoes, gloves, parasols and—of course—a corset. Next February the show will travel to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and then, in the summer, to the Art Institute of Chicago, where curator Gloria Groom first came up with the whole idea in 2008.

While the U.S. will see a different selection of clothing (the Paris pieces are too fragile to travel), for the first time Americans will get Paris's surviving fragments from Monet's enormous abandoned work, "Luncheon on the Grass" (1865-66). They are full of superbly dressed picnickers.

The show is breaking ground for the Musée d'Orsay, which has yet to mount the fashion-related shows that have proven such crowd-pleasers for its New York collaborator.

The Paris version draws on local collections of historical clothes, including the Musée Galliera, a city-run fashion museum. Before Coco Chanel's Little Black Dress, there were the big black dresses of early Belle Époque Paris—flowing cascades of perfectly dyed black silk, meant to show off the wearer's fashionably pale skin. The show overflows with black dresses, on canvas and on mannequins—from Édouard Manet's 1878 masterpiece "La Parisienne," on loan from Stockholm, to a circa 1878 organza dress by Parisian dressmaker Madame Roger. (Read entire article.)
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