Fashionable Antiquity
The Exhibitions Du coeur a la Main: Dolce & Gabbana and Louvre Couture in Paris
It is generally accepted that contemporary art is opposed to all kinds of popular fashion design shows, especially fashion weeks, prêt-à-porter shows, and other “luxury weeks”. However, recent exhibitions held in Paris – in the Grand Palais and the Louvre – have been designed to debunk this stereotype.
Photos: Sergei Khachaturov
The Grand Palais is hosting the exhibition Du coeur a la Main: Dolce & Gabbana, whereas in the Louvre Couture show, visitors can see the intervention of high fashion samples in the giant section of the museum dedicated to European decorative art (located on the first floor of the Richelieu wing). These two exhibitions are united by the idea of a dialogue between contemporary fashion design and ancient art, from antiquity to Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Moreover, both exhibitions are of great importance in terms of reconfiguring the optics of what is considered “high”, “low”, “elite” or “for the masses” in terms of fashion and art. Ultimately, they make us think about how the contemporary field is inevitably expanding as it attracts former enemies as allies.
The gigantic demonstration of high fashion dresses and accessories at Du coeur a la Main: Dolce & Gabbana is divided into eleven themes, from the Renaissance and heroic antiquity to the opera performances and balls held in the days of Giuseppe Verdi. The parades of outfits can be likened to luxurious theatrical performances involving elements of music, lighting and video. The main characters are dresses stylized as an image of an ancient era: mindbogglingly delicate work with texture, materials, and embroidery on the theme of the Sistine Madonna or ancient Greek ornaments... Baroque still lifes create a “wow effect” that disarms even the most inveterate skeptic. In a separate room, you’ll find a reconstruction of the studio itself – a collection of the props and tools of the design house’s sewing workshop.
How could one define this mix of high craftsmanship and a somewhat simple-minded method of popular stylization of eras and civilizations? Of course, the concept of camp, invented by the art theorist Susan Sontag, immediately comes to mind. It addresses not only queer culture, but also everything connected with the cult of high-minded shock value – a shameless mixing of the sentimentally philistine and the sublime. According to Sontag, camp is able to break through the wall of alienation between the highly intellectual and the banal. Excessive boundless beauty touches the hidden strings of the soul, tuning them to the frequency of the foundational genetic code of human empathy. Just as children's toys are not made to correspond to the standards of good taste but to give warmth and happiness, so does excessive beauty produce generous emotions comparable to the glitter of gifts under the Christmas tree.
These basic qualities of camp culture make it an excellent interlocutor with the modern world, where the grand narratives of modernism and postmodernism have fallen and global utopias have turned into ruins. Framing situations of dialogue without imposing rules for its conduct, as well as rejecting the positions of a strong director/dictator, are the essential qualities of the new intermedial genre. Surprisingly, the fashion world sometimes supports this theme more convincingly than the intellectual contemporary projects of leftist art.
It is important to note that all the stagings of the Dolce & Gabbana exhibition have been structurally created like expensive frames, but without any events or even a plot inside of the frame. Mannequins without faces are the ideal symbol of this frame-structure, presenting a brilliant cut and emptiness in the core of their figurative message. Designer frames and costumes on faceless mannequins introduce a situation where the event of art itself is imagined, disturbing and awaited with impatience. But this event is not embodied in the narrative; it slips away, melts away, like the glitter of fashion shows. The world of fashion turned out to be a sensitive interlocutor with the newest world of contemporary art, which suggests light touches rather than didactic speech and any obsessive existential experiences of the artist.
This same world of fashion supported the history of styles as an alternative presentation of the history of art. The standards of classicism and norms of taste have long been overturned in those things that are stored in the sections of the decorative and applied genre. Cups, dresses, carpets and porcelain figurines have always been a bizarre commentary on the mainstream. They violated the conventions of proper presentation and were not shy of excess, bizarreness, and manneristic twists. Today they are a projection of our mental reaction to the world, a reaction that is neurotic and excessively complex. The gigantic design section of the Richelieu wing of the Louvre usually sees a small number of visitors, unlike the Sully wing, where the Mona Lisa is kept. The clever curators of Louvre Couture have introduced haute couture items from different eras into the halls of decorative art, and they now live in a complex, interesting dialogue with the surrounding antiques. For example – a chainmail tunic printed on a 3D-printer next to handmade medieval armor; cinematographic props and materializations of computer game fantasies are reflected in the ancient mirror of patterns of medieval imagination.
Dresses from Gucci and Chanel are exquisitely written into the interiors of dancing furniture and fragile Rococo trinkets, while stylized uniforms of the Empire era make up an ensemble together with gold and white services of the Napoleonic era. Both eras have something to say to each other. It cannot be overstated how delightfully interesting it is to solve the puzzles and rebuses of this schizoid dialogue between high fashion and ancient crafts. Antiquity turns out to be a bizarre visionary of the modern sense of style. Thanks to high fashion, the Louvre’s old half-asleep halls of decorative art now attract curious visitors.
In both cases, these exhibitions show how the “low” genre of high fashion can become a powerful catalyst for ideas and feelings as it hits the relevant nerves of the times we live in.
Title image: © Didier Plowy pour le GrandPalaisRmn 2024
