The Pola Art Foundation?is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and as part of this, the Pola Museum of Art has organized an ambitious exhibition that aims to present a cross-disciplinary view of art, product design and women¡¯s fashion of 19th- and early 20th-century France.
With two floors of vintage clothing, beautifully crafted cosmetic paraphernalia, archive illustrations and paintings by some of the big names of impressionism and post-impressionism, the exhibits are diverse in form and function. This combination of media works especially well when magazine pages or paintings depicting a particular type of dress are shown with actual items of clothing from the period in question. The exhibition opens, for example, with a delicate English cotton and silk afternoon dress, ringed with eggshell blue stripes, dating back to the 1860s. Displayed alongside is the 1865 painting ¡°The Beach Near Trouville¡± by Eugene Boudin, which shows society belles dressed in a similar fashion.
Though the title of the show is ¡°Modern Beauty: Art and Fashion in France,¡± most of the sample dresses are in fact from England. However, with trends being carefully followed from across the channel throughout the Industrial Revolution, this is not a serious impediment to understanding the major shifts in style. In both countries the high-waisted neo-classical Empire-line dress gave way to corsetry, hooped skirts and crinoline around the 1820s. This was followed by a flattened front, achieved with tight lacing and corsetry, and the exaggerated posterior of the bustle, a contraption made of wire and/or padding that is iconic of the complex nature of Victorian-era sexuality.
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