Lace, Movies & Spectacular Glamor at Cité Internationale de la Dentelle et de la Mode de Calais {Fashion Notes}
The advertising poster for a new exhibition entitled Plein les Yeux, le Spectacle de la Mode! / Feast for the Eyes, Spectacular Fashions at the Cité Internationale de la Dentelle et de la Mode de Calais (16 January - April 28, 2013) reveals a Thierry Mugler model designed for Lady Macbeth at Avignon. The news are all the more exciting to this blogger as - full disclosure - the exhibit takes place in the former lace factory owned by forefathers Peeters & Perrin, now a lace museum...
The museum was inaugurated in 2009 by the Ministry of Culture as the International City of Fashion and Lace (family members were invited but I couldn't make it personally).
Thinking back, I may have been (very) unconsciously tapping back into that heritage by baptizing the site MimiFroufrou.com, although I wasn't exactly lulled to sleep with lace-industry stories in my childhood -- and what woman doesn't love beautiful lace anyway (it turns out men wore lace before women)!
I thus just learned that the popular "Fête" model by French lingerie brand Chantelle comes from a design created in 1938 by Peeters & Perrin.
The exhibition, to open on January 16, 2013, is in the same vein as the one currently running under the title Hollywood Costume at the V & A in London.
The pieces shown will compare aristocratic, historical fashions with show-business items while stressing the manners in which sartorial codes were borrowed and reinterpreted in a modern setting. The accent is put on ostentatious and more extreme fashion accessories such as, e.g., the corset, the crinoline and the ruff.
Clothes from the Musée National de la Renaissance and the CNCS will mingle with costumes from the Comédie-Française and the Cinémathèque Française.
Dior, Chanel, Givenchy, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler will be showcased next to dresses from Gone with the Wind / Autant en Emporte le Vent and La Reine Margot, and more.
