In this week’s blog post, Costume Society News Editor Dr Babette Radclyffe-Thomas reviews La Galerie du 19M’s recent exhibition ‘Lesage, 100 years of fashion and decoration’.
Founded in 1924 as partnership between Albert Lesage and the embroiderer Albert Michonet, Lesage has played a pivotal role in the history of Haute Couture and fashion by creating pieces of artistic craftmanship for a wide range of fashion houses. La Galerie du 19M, Paris recently hosted an in-depth exhibition commemorating this legendary embroidery and weaving house and celebrating the House of Lesage’s first centenary.
Lesage was integrated into Chanel's Maisons d’art ecosystem in 2022 and is now based in the 19M complex in Paris. Lesage currently has the world’s largest collection and archive of artistic embroidery comprising 75,000 samples including pieces made for some of the world’s most famous fashion designers such as Madame Vionnet, Elsa Schiaperelli, Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Lacroix.
The ‘Lesage 100 years of fashion and decoration’ exhibition opened 26 September 2024 and was extremely popular: welcoming over 25,000 visitors within just a few months. Garments, samples, and even digitalisations of Lesage pieces were on show over eight sections, which also showcased collaborations with contemporary creators in the field of fashion, visual arts, decoration, and spatial and object design.
The first room of the exhibition explored the origins of the House as well as the workshop, with samples and good-luck charms used by artisans from the 1920s. This room introduced the exceptional technical skills and techniques Lesage is renowned for, a key theme of the whole exhibition. In this room a loom was set up to show how an iconic Chanel tweed is woven. Lesage first proposed a suite of tweeds to Chanel for ready-to-wear collections in 1998 and since 2008 Lesage has designed a range of Haute Couture tweed creations for the brand.
Visitors then entered The Archive Room, where digital fashion films directed by Romain Cieutat gave viewers an unprecedented view of the archives. 3D reconstructions of 10 of the house’s iconic samples were played with the smallest details enlarged to a momentous scale, creating an immersive landscape of sequins, threads, textures and colours. Using the same technology commonly used for the digital conservation of fossils, ancient statues and insects, the process of archive digitalisation involved the taking of three to six hundred photographs of the featured items from every angle.
Four fascinating ‘3D suits’ from the Chanel Haute Couture 2015/16 collection opened the next room. Produced using a laser sintering technique, these suits were painted, embroidered with pearls, lined with satin, embroidered or trimmed with leather. “The idea was to take the most iconic jacket of the 20th century and make a 21st century version of it, which technically was not even imaginable at the time of the jacket’s conception,” Lagerfeld said of the collection at the time.
Following on from the 3D suits, the third room introduced the intricate collaborations that can occur between the designer and the embroider who adorns the garment. Visitors were taken behind the scenes of the creation of a 1962 A/W Balenciaga garment and were shown the process from initial sketches, pattern pieces, sample experiments into the final garment.
Yves Saint Laurent and Lesage’s collaborative reproductions of modern art masterpieces were a particular highlight of the exhibition. In the late 1980s Saint Laurent worked with Lesage to recreate pieces inspired by Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh and more incorporating complex and colourful embroideries, a selection of which were on show.
A section of the exhibition was dedicated to Chanel and Lesage’s collaborative relationship. In 2002 Lagerfeld envisioned the Metiers d’art collections, a new way to showcase the savoir-faire of the various heritage workshops that Chanel had acquired. These collections are shown every year in early December in various global locations.
The final rooms explored Lesage’s work in interior design and collaborations with contemporary artists, including artist Aristide’s Murmuration piece of work comprising hundreds of embroidered starlings on several layers of organza that were created in public workshops.
The exhibition ran until 26 January 2025.
While in Paris, Babette also visited Foundation Cartier's Olga de Amaral exhibition, which she reviewed and you can catch up with on our blog.
