CRAFTS IN FULL BLOOM: Have you ever heard of Nicole Lefort, Maison Planès or Ganeshi Lall & Son?
Few are familiar with these specialists but it’s through their hands and workshops that pieces for the likes of Balenciaga, Chanel, Dior, Schiaparelli and even Van Cleef & Arpels have come to life.
Lefort, for example, was at the head of an atelier producing hand-painted silks that Karl Lagerfeld used for dresses in his fall 1974 collection at Chloé.
She is among the unsung yet indispensable hands that take center stage in “Weaving, Embroidering, Embellishing, The Crafts and Trades of Fashion,” the first in an exhibition triptych at Palais Galliera that will look at the crafts and know-how that underpin the industry.
Open from Saturday and running through Oct. 18 in the museum’s underground Gabrielle Chanel Galleries, the first chapter is dedicated to floral motifs as a throughline to explore the wealth of techniques used to embellish and decorate garments and accessories.
For the museum’s director Emilie Hammen, zeroing in on the hands behind the scenes — in the vast majority of cases, remaining unacknowledged — is what makes fashion history a very vibrant and living field.
“We have not finished discovering who all the actors in this [field] are,” she said during a preview. “That is precisely our starting point for this exhibition: asking who all the collaborators, all the individuals who contributed to this collective work of fashion are.”
A view of the Judith Barbier workshop.
François Kollar / Bibliothèque Forney / Roger-Viollet / Courtesy of Palais Galliera
Drawn from the museum’s permanent collections, some 350 pieces spanning garments, accessories and footwear, as well as fabric swatches and sketches, follow a thematic thread around techniques such as printing, weaving, embroidery, beading and lacework.
“Often we only have the name of the designer [or] of the house with its artistic director but we rarely have mentions of others involved,” said Marie-Laure Gutton, head of the accessories collection of the museum, who curated the exhibition alongside Samy Jelil, conservation assistant.
Exploring the origins of motifs such as chinoiserie blooms used on Manila shawls or a pineapple appearing via Indian-style block printing also telegraphed the curatorial team’s desire to break away from a Paris-centric view of luxury and fashion, said Gutton.
They also showed that the Silk Road was not a one-way street, whether culturally or in terms of commerce.
On top of discovering common threads between, say, a Givenchy by Alexander McQueen couture suit from the spring 1999 couture collection and an 18th-century men’s waistcoat, the exhibition offers tantalizing details, such as the origins of velvet — central Asia in the seventh century — or a 1910 patent by Mario Fortuny to improve rotary printing processes by using large-format stencils.
As a companion to the exhibition, a “Galerie des Métiers” set in the curved gallery also located on the lower level highlights a number of specialist workshops.
They range from the likes of Chanel-owned cornerstones such as Lesage, Atelier Montex and Goossens to Hurel, the oldest French embroiderer still in activity and in the hands of the fifth generation of the founding family, and contemporary duo Baqué Molinié, who launched in 2018.
