Paris – On the horizon of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the city’s fashion museums are preparing by highlighting the interaction between clothing and sport.
The first to take the plunge, the Palais Galliera Museum explores the impact of physical activity and the rise of modern sport on clothing in “Fashion in Motion”, an exhibition drawn from its permanent collections.
The exhibition will run until September 7, 2025 in the museum’s underground Gabrielle Chanel Galleries, and it is divided into three parts to ensure the preservation of fragile garments, with the first part continuing until March 15, 2024.
While the “Mode and Sport, from platform to platform” exhibition, scheduled at the Decorative Arts from September 20 to April 7, 2024, will bring sports fashion from ancient times to current sportswear through the prism of tennis, skiing and football,” said Marie-Laurie Gutton. , President of the Galliera Accessories Group, explains that the Palais Galliera curatorial team “wanted to go beyond the link between fashion and sport, and think of clothing as a relationship to the body and its movements”.
Continuing on from the first of the Musée de la Mode’s permanent collections, the exhibition follows a chronological and thematic thread beginning in the 18th century and continuing to the present day, highlighting how the liberation of the body has led to the evolution of garment through some 250 pieces.
These ideas come from physical exercises [a path to] Improving health and improving society in general came to underpin French social policy and the permeation of our culture, for men but later for women as well,” said Gutton, who attributed much of these developments to the English aristocratic practice of outdoor physical activities which spread. to continental Europe as these wealthy families settled there.
18th century dresses that required corsets, wheels and ample padding to achieve their shape, the exhibits explore the look of each decade with tiered layers to allow people, and women in particular, to walk, ride a horse, hunt, then drive, cycle, or swim.
In the early twentiesthere As early as the 20th century, figures such as Paul Poiret, Gabrielle Chanel and Jean Patou established themselves as proponents of a freer silhouette, first by removing the corset, inserting the chemise or shortening the helens. A Bon Marché fan promo highlights all the activities women were encouraged to do circa 1910 and the outfits they could buy at the department store to do so.
Julien Vidal / Courtesy of Palais Galliera
From the 1950s, fashion designers such as Elsa Schiaparelli adopted sportswear in their ready-to-wear lines and in the 1960s, between miniskirts and the two-piece “Atom” swimsuit by French designer Jacques Heim – often forgotten in favor of the bikini, the famous competitor who came The same year – bodies, mainly women, were released.
Closer to today, the 1980s were a time “when fashion became more aware of reality [such as the AIDS and financial crises] Meanwhile, we’re moving towards a more athletic body aesthetic with a fit,” Gutton said, with embellished silhouettes by Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana juxtaposed with looks by Sonia Rykiel, a rhinestone-embellished tracksuit set and Like Des Rei Kawakubo of Boys. Fluid and draped dress.
The fusion of couture and sport sums up the 90s with a glamorous 1991 Chanel jumpsuit, styled with lycra and cropped shorts, as seen on Linda Evangelista.
The exhibition concludes with a trio of silhouettes from the early 2000sStreet Century, “where the connection between fashion, sport and activewear forms a big bubble where everything mixes”, with a look drawn from the wardrobe of Sarah Andelman, former artistic director of Colette, to whom we attributes the fashion signature of the sneaker; Olivier Rousteing’s post-lockdown costume, mask and all, a fall 2001 creation by Yohji Yamamoto who preconceived the launch of Y-3 and the advent of bespoke streetwear.
The Paris Saint-Germain football shirt, number 10 of Dior ambassador and star player Kylian Mbappe, brings the show “loop and loop, since we started with the everyday clothes used in sports activities and ended with the sportswear used in everyday life – without those that also represent a desire of society but also the fact that sports stars have become fashion icons.
With its status as a ubiquitous fashion phenomenon, sneakers are given a division of their own, with models ranging from Converse’s Chuck Taylor All Star, the first basketball shoe made in 1923, to designer kicks, including including Balenciaga’s 2004 style from The Nicolas Ghesquière period includes designs by Valentino as well as Nike Sacai and collaborations between Rick Owens and Adidas.
Accompanying the three seasons of “La Mode en Mouvement”, self-coloring color images, swimwear and winter sports will be presented in the curved gallery also located on the lower level and will rotate in sync with each part.
Courtesy of Palais Galliera
The first, “The Colors of Fashion”, is devoted to Autochrome Lumière photographs, a complex and costly artisanal process that preceded the color photography developed by the Lumière brothers.
Recently discovered at the Musée des Sciences et Techniques in Paris, these fashion photographs were taken between 1921 and 1923 for the Salon du Goût Français (or “Exposition du Goût Français”), an exhibition of French luxury goods intended to support the economy of the country after the World Cup. War I.
“The unprecedented thing for us as fashion historians is to see the fashion of the time in color where there was no process. There were black and white photographs or illustrations, but color photography was still decades away. »
In these images are highlighted the styles of the time but also “the subtlety of each texture, texture, all that one reads in journalism at the time, but suddenly felt, almost felt by this [photographic] process,” the photography expert continued.
Advertising poster “In 2023, we will see the year 1923” for the traveling exhibition of French crafts. “We just went with what the organizers had planned at the time,” joked Lecallier.
