Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915, featuring selections from the museum’s recently acquired major collection of European men’s, women’s, and children’s dress and accessories. On view through March 27th, the exhibition includes nearly 160 examples of fashionable dress, undergarments, and accessories, many on view for the first time. Curated by Sharon S. Takeda, department head and senior curator, and Kaye D. Spilker, curator of costume and textiles at LACMA, the exhibition tells the story of fashion’s aesthetic and technical development from the Age of Enlightenment to World War I.
"After seeing these rare objects," said Michael Govan, "It was clear that we should bring the collection to Los Angeles. This acquisition has catapulted the museum’s holdings of European costume to the highest category of quality."
"The addition of this extraordinary collection is a coup simply for its breadth and depth," said Takeda. "But even more significantly for its overall quality and number of extremely rare pieces — shown widely in this exhibition."
Organized in four thematic sections — Timeline, Textiles, Tailoring, and Trim — the exhibition examines the sweeping changes that occurred in fashionable dress from 1700 to 1915, providing an in-depth look at the details of luxurious textiles, exacting tailoring techniques, and lush trimmings.
Timeline
As the first of the four sections, this portion offers a chronological panorama of both female and male fashions. The women’s visual timeline is illustrated with dresses in various shades of white in order to focus attention on the evolving fashionable silhouette — how each successive era changed waistlines and hemlines and emphasized a different part of the human anatomy. By contrast, the men’s timeline begins with colorful examples that showcase how eighteenth-century aristocratic men rivaled their female counterparts in the desire to impress with dress, and concludes with a subdued 1911 pinstripe suit, a harbinger of the business suit that has remained relatively unchanged for a century.
Textiles
The fashioning of fashion begins with the choice of fabric by medium, weight, color, and occasionally pattern. An assortment of textiles — from silk to cotton, gauze to velvet, plain to printed — is highlighted in the Textiles section. Throughout the eighteenth century, new designs for dress fabrics emerged with each change of season. The fabrication of lavish textiles by hand on drawlooms was labor-intensive and therefore expensive, as seen with the circa 1715 bizarre silk man’s waistcoat. Even with technical innovations such as the perfection of the Jacquard loom attachment in 1801 (which allowed for increasingly complex patterns to be woven semi-mechanically) fabric often remained the costliest feature of high fashion.
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