The tailoring section explores the manipulation of textiles through cutting, stitching, and padding in order to sculpt three-dimensional garments that conformed to the idealized shape or fashionable silhouette of each era. In the eighteenth century, lengths of expensive fabric were used efficiently with little waste; cut into few pattern pieces, garments were hand-stitched. Suit jackets for men were unpadded while dresses were given volume with the aid of wide hooped petticoats known as paniers.
During the nineteenth century, with the advancement of tailoring tools and techniques, styles changed in dramatic ways, accentuating or minimizing different body parts —shoulders, breasts, waist, hips, derriere — in ongoing attempts to keep up with fashion.
Trim
The artistry of embroiderers, quilters, and lace makers is undeniable when examining the details of the elegantly embellished garments that will be on display in the Trim section. Examples such as the eighteenth-century man’s wool suit with stunning gold-coated silver threads and sequins and the late nineteenth-century woman’s wool and silk velvet evening mantle designed by Émile Pingat (France, active 1860-1896) and decorated with silk and metallic-thread embroidery, glass beads, and ostrich-feather trim highlight the time-consuming hand techniques of artisans.
Fashioning Fashion offers an enriching opportunity to examine the transformation of fashion over a span of more than two centuries, as well as providing historical context to show how political events, technical inventions, and global trade profoundly affected style.
Fashioning Fashion is one of the three exhibitions opening LACMA’s new Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, a 45,000-square-foot building by Pritzker prize-winning architect Renzo Piano. The installation is designed by renowned opera stage designers Pier Luigi Pizzi and Massimo Pizzi Gasparon — their first project in Los Angeles. A fully illustrated catalog, Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700 - 1915 by Sharon Sadako Takeda, Kaye Durland Spilker, John Galliano will accompany the exhibit and is co-published by Delmonico Books-Prestel. Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915 was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Additional features on the website, include the PDF downloading of annotated patterns based on some of the historical designs in the exhibit. Thomas John Bernard, a theatrical costume designer, worked with the curators and conservators of the Costume and Textiles Department at LACMA to draw these patterns approximating the design of garments in our collection.
There's also an interactive costume party feature for children as well as an Artist's Respond, an ongoing series of web-based creative projects by artists responding to exhibitions and collections on view at LACMA.
Photographs © 2010 Museum Associates/LACMA:
(1) Detail of Dress, England, c. 1830. Silk plain weave (organza) and silk satin with imitation-pearl glass beads.
(2) Detail of Dress (robe à la française), Amsterdam, 1740–60. Silk satin with silk and metallic-thread supplementary weft-float patterning.
(3) Detail of Vest, France, 1789–94. Linen canvas with silk needlepoint, linen plain weave with silk supplementary-warp cut-pile trim and silk embroidery.
(4) Suit, France, c. 1760. Coat and waistcoat: wool plain weave, full finish, with sequins and metallic-thread embroidery; breeches: wool plain weave, full finish, with silk and metallic-thread passementerie.
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