Roughly a month ago the Museo San Telmo in San Sebastián, Spain, opened the exhibition "Frivolité" (until 28th September 2014) that analyses fashion at the court in the 18th century, tackling different aspects of French garments in those times.
The 42 pieces on display – most of them donned by the high society – are pretty rare to find even in institutions specialised in fashion. Quite a few of the pieces included (all recently restored) come in fact from a private collection and were donated by Concepción Cuadra y Viteri, wife of Chilean painter Santiago Arcos.
The luxurious silk fabrics, decorations and embroideries employed for dresses, shirts, trousers and jackets (matched with exquisite accessories such as bags and fans), evoke the elegance, style and frivolity of the courtesans, providing insights about their lives.
In some cases it was even possible to track down the owner of a specific piece: one undergarment is for example embroidered with the letters "The(át)re V. Déjazet", standing for Virginie Déjazet, a Parisian actress famous for the love song "La Lisette de Béranger", written by Frédéric Bérat.
Though the pastel colours for these designs are quite beautiful, curators also tried to look at quite funny aspects linked with these palettes such as the unusual names employed to describe different shades of yellows and greens ("kitchen green", "nymph legs" and "poisoned monkey", just to mention a few, but the list is pretty long…).
To contextualise the pieces, the curators included in the event prints, paintings and fashion magazines, documents that illustrate the evolution throughout the decades of key garments.
A few days ago the museum added another rare piece to the exhibition, a dress lent by the Getaria-based Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum.
Designed in 1956, the cocktail dress in a striking turquoise shade clearly shows the historical and artistic (Zurbarán, Velázquez, Goya, Picasso…) inspirations borrowed by Balenciaga for his own designs.
Donated by Carmen Beramonte Cominges, the dress is characterised by a rather traditional silhouette, a fitted bodice and voluminous skirt, but the latter features beautiful sculpted draped motifs that call to mind the polonaises from the 1770s-1780s.
The two museums involved in this exhibition see this opportunity as a way to collaborate together on a practical level: people who will visit one of the institutions will get a discount on the admission to the second museum.
These exchanges and collaborations between different cultural institutions should actually be encouraged and, hopefully, further museums all over the world will follow this example.
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