À la Mode. The Art of Appearance in the 18th Century

Dress is the cultural object par excellence, and its history and representation during the Enlightenment is that of not only a material culture, but also of the imagination. In the eighteenth century, the birth of fashion was synonymous with society’s rapid transformation. It raised questions of liberty, between ostentation and morality, courtly luxury and religious strictures.

Painters and their patrons maintained a particular aesthetic and professional relationship with fashion. Artist were part of the creation of textile patterns and were disseminators of ways to dress. Representations of fashion in portraits and genre scenes lead to investigations of the links between the model and their costume: real clothes, the painter’s “studio wardrobe,” ceremonial staging, or imaginary costume? The juxtaposing of pictorial works with actual eighteenth-century costumes allows the staging of the body to be explored, the tension between the spectacular realms of the imagination and the realities of society, between elegance of the costume and the eroticism of the undressed, between social expectations and the whims of taste.

This exhibition was presented in Musée d'arts de Nantes from 26 November 2021 to 6 March 2022.