Les Couleurs de La Mode Exhibition at the Palais Galliera Paris

27 August 2023, by Cally Blackman

In this week's blog dress historian Cally Blackman gives an insight into the exhibition Les Couleurs de la Mode, currently on display at the Palais Galliera, Paris, until March 2024. With the exhibition featuring over 100 digitised autochromes, Cally uses her deep knowledge and passion of autochromes to provide fascinating background to the exhibition's displays.

The exhibition Les Couleurs de la Mode currently on display at the Palais Galliera Paris until March 2024 celebrates the Salon du Goût Français, a gallery of luxury French commodities represented virtually in rich colour through the back-lit glass slides of autochromes, a photographic process refined and manufactured by the Lumierè brothers. Shown in Paris 1921-1923, the Salon also undertook two international tours overseas. (For full details see my article in Costume Vol. 56 No. 1 March 2022). Most of the two thousand autochromes in the Salon archive are of fashion, including couture and ready to wear, accessories, childrenswear and menswear, yet when I came across them fifteen years ago, in 2008, they were known only to photography historians, although some had been published in an academic article and a few were floating around on the web: the entire collection of glass plates remained inaccessible in store at the Conservatoire of the Musée des Art et Métiers (CNAM) in Paris where they had been deposited in 1928.

Since 2008, I have been obsessed with autochromes in general, not just for their beauty but more importantly, for the robust, irrefutable (once exposed, like a Polaroid, they could not be edited) evidence of the colour of clothes they provide, even though many are now faded and/or damaged. Nonetheless, there are thousands of surviving examples that bring the past vividly into our present through their representation of lifelike colour, the hue and and texture of skin, clothes, accessories, fabric, and embroidery, sometimes in incredible detail. Amazed that I had never seen any autochromes featured in fashion history books, the representation of dress in this ground-breaking yet little-known process has been the focus of my research ever since and I am thrilled that in 2024 Thames & Hudson will be publishing my book on the subject, featuring over 350 autochromes alongside complimentary images and 40,000 words of text.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With the help of some funding from Central Saint Martins (UAL) (where I have taught fashion history for over twenty years) I have visited archives and collections in America, France and the UK as well as spending many hours in libraries and online and getting to know specialist scholars and collectors who share my passion (see my UAL research page here). Many collections have now been or are being digitized, bringing these fragile objects literally into the light, preserving and making them fully accessible. There is much more to be done with this rich body of material that illuminates and colours our perception of many global fashion systems in the first thirty years of the twentieth century when the autochrome was in use (for example, see my article in Costume Vol. 48 No. 2 June 2014 about the dress of the inhabitants of the Claddagh near Galway in Western Ireland) and I am looking forward to exploring new themes in the future.

I realised only recently that my love affair with autochromes went much further back than 2008, to the early 1970s in fact, when I came across a dreamy autochrome taken in 1921 by Jacques-Henri Lartigue of his wife Bibi under a parasol on the Côte d’Azur pasted into my art school Fashion Foundation scrapbook. In a similar uncanny way, it is amazing that Les Couleurs de la Mode, the exhibition about the Salon du Gout Français that I proposed to the Palais Galliera eighteen months ago, is taking place in 2023, exactly one hundred years since its last appearance in Paris. Featuring a hundred newly scanned facsimiles of the original autochromes, alongside my collection of original material relating to the Salon, contemporary printed media and surviving garments and accessories from the Galliera collection, I sincerely hope that some Costume Society members will be able to share in my excitement and enjoy a new perspective on early 1920s Paris fashion through the astonishingly vivid images brought to life again in this ‘très belle exposition’ brilliantly curated by Sylvie Lécallier and Nathalie Boulouch for the Galliera!

The Salon du Goût Français was a ground-breaking exhibition of autochromes that took place in Paris in 1921, 1922 and 1923 and went on two overseas tours to North America, Australasia, and the Far East. The little-known autochrome process, launched by the Lumière brothers in 1907, was the most reliable register of colour in photography available until the early 1930s, their lush, velvety brilliance not only providing robust evidence of the authentic colour and texture of clothing and textiles, through the designs by the grands couturiers to ready to wear manufacturers and the ateliers that supported the French fashion industry, but also inviting a new interpretation of early 1920s Paris fashion,.

Les Couleurs de la Mode exhibition features over 100 recently digitized examples of autochromes, many never seen before, from the Salon archive alongside surviving dress, accessories, and printed media from the period.

If anyone has any autochromes that might be of interest, please contact callyblackman@gmail.com.

For reviews and insights from more international and UK based exhibitions, visit the Costume Society blog.