Tagged with 'Paris'

Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams is the V&A's latest blockbuster exhibition to focus on the social and cultural power of clothing - from the savage beauty of Alexander McQueen to the iconography of Frida Khalo, and now, Christian Dior’s enduring juxtaposition of fantasy and functionalism, softness and tailoring that has kept fashion lovers in thrall to his brand for over 70 years.

Based on the original exhibition curated by Olivier Gabet and Florence Müllerat Le Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, the V&A show has additional material selected by the V&A’s senior fashion curator Oriole Cullen. Dior in Britain, a section especially created for the London show, celebrates Monsieur Dior’s relationship to the city, its craft ateliers and the celebrated women who became his clients.

”Dior admired the grandeur of the great houses and gardens of Britain, as well as British-designed ocean liners, including the Queen Mary," Cullen explains. This unique selection of work includes a series of collaborative pieces designed by Dior but created by British craft houses such as Dents. It culminates in a beautiful Dior gown worn by Princess Margaret on her 21st birthday



Image: Princess Margaret, wearing Dior for her 21st birthday

"In 1947, Christian Dior changed the face of fashion with his New Look,” said Cullen,“which redefined the female silhouette and reinvigorated the post-war Parisian fashion industry.” Tragically Monsieur Dior himself was only at the helm of his eponymous brand for a decade before his sudden and unexpected death in Italy.

It is testament to the strength of his vision that the designers who followed in his footsteps were each, in their own way, able to evolve the label, whilst ensuring that the core elements of Dior’s world remained constant - although each of these visionary creatives emphasised differing qualities of Dior’s voice. The exhibition is organized around these themes, from the Garden to the Ballroom.



Image 1: 30 Avenue Montaigne, Paris, circa 1947
Image 2: Christian Dior with model Lucky, circa 1955

"The influence of Christian Dior's design was all-pervasive and helped to define an era. In their own individual ways, each of the house's successive artistic directors has referenced and reinterpreted Dior's own designs and continued the legacy of the founder ensuring that the house of Christian Dior is at the forefront of fashion today," Cullen suggests.

Whilst the universe John Galliano created under the banner of Dior was one of the brand’s most recognised eras, the exhibition makes clear the strength of both Raf Simons’ and Maria Grazia Chiuri’s visions for the house. In their own ways, each of the two most recent artistic directors have been able to capture and distill Dior’s magical combination of the fantastical with the wearable, whilst remaining true to the energy and direction of their times.



Image 1: Bar Suit by Christian Dior, 1947
Image 2: Coat, 2012 by Raf Simons
Image 2: Dress, 2018, by Maria Grazia Chiuri

If anything else, the exhibition emphasises how hard it is to design legendary, epoch defining clothes. Whilst there are some genuinely stunning garments in the show, it is hard to come away from it without thinking that, with the exception of the recently revived Galliano designed Dior Saddle bag, the New Look was by far the label’s most globally recognised silhouette.

For all this, Dior: Designer of Dreams is a feast for both fashion connoisseurs and interested observers, the quality of workmanship rightly celebrated throughout the exhibition, and a reminder of why Dior has reigned supreme over the world of fashion since 1947.

Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams is at the V&A from 2 February - 1 September 2019.

Winterson's Creative Director Alice Cicolini takes a retrospective glance at the celebrated Al Thani collection of jewellery. The exhibition, which first appeared in Bejewelled Treasures at London's Victoria & Albert Museum, is set to open this Spring at the Grand Palais, Paris in March 2017.

The Al Thani Collection is a unique collection of jewels from an unusually broad chronological period that spans the Mughal period of the early 1600s to the present day. With such a diverse group of objects to select from, the V&A exhibition's curator Susan Stronge paints an impressive, if partial, picture of the development of Indian jewellery techniques and tastes.

Jewellery in Mughal society

The focus in the early part of the exhibition emphasises the almost ubiquitous presence of gemstones and jewellery throughout the Mughal court: from fly whisks and wine cups, to backscratchers and huqqa bases. The prevalence of precious and semi-precious gems led visitors to India in this period to remark on the magnificence of courtly life, its gem-encrusted thrones and imperial bodies that sparkled with jewels.

Hindu rulers lived under clear instruction as to the importance of establishing of an almost God-like regal body politic, through dress, jewellery and grooming. This remarkable profusion of jewellery, which their Mughal successors appeared to share, went far beyond the ruling classes to encompass men and women at all levels of society.



Image 1: Spinel and pearl necklace
Image 2: Silk sword sash with jewelled gold fittings

This is very revealing of the important role that jewellery played, not simply in the creation of status, but in what modern historian Daud Ali has described as “the spiritual and literary life of Indian societies” and the “association of jewels with light, virtue and beauty”. It is in early Sanskrit texts such as the arthashastra and brihatsamhita that the spiritual, cultural and healing values of stones, grading & assessment and jewellery techniques began to be established.

A love for pearls and gems

Many of these central tenets of gemlore still inform contemporary Indian jewellery making and buying practice, today with the navratna, or nine-stones, continuing to play a alismanic role in jewellery culture. Of these, the five great stones, or mahararatnani, - diamond, pearl, ruby, sapphire and emerald - dominate Indian jewellery culture as they did several hundred years ago.

As a result, for pearl lovers the Bejewelled Treasure exhibition offers a wealth of extremely fine examples. Visitors to India frequently remarked on the ropes of pearls that covered the bodies of both men and women, rulers and lesser subjects alike, upon which it would have been difficult to place a price. The arthashastra particularly notes methods for grading pearls, and the types of necklaces into which they could be strung, including one gravity-defying necklace of 1,008 rows.

It may be that one of the reasons that visitors saw pearls worn by non-royal courtiers was that, much like their British equivalents, Indian rulers charged their servants with wearing their pearls during the day to keep them both warm and luminous. Although the geographical proximity to the pearl fishers of the Arabian Gulf and Sri Lanka would have given Indian rulers greater access to pearls than some of their European peers, the pearl was still regarded a symbol of status. Some rulers were believed to drink powdered pearls as an aphrodisiac, and the Sanskrit word for pearl, manjari, means “bud” denoting the sensuality the gem has come to symbolise.



Image 1: Diamond turban jewel made for the Maharaja of Nawanagar
Image 2: Cartier Brooch set with emeralds, sapphires and diamonds

Other notable aspects of the exhibition include several exquisite examples of spinel, a stone which has long been celebrated in the subcontinent whilst remaining relatively unknown in the West. A combination of increasing scarcity, the price of tourmaline, the prevalence in the market of glass-filled and heat treated ruby and the spinel’s relatively low profile, however, marks this gemstone out as a major jewellery trend.

One of the main centerpieces of the show, and one of the few pieces in the exhibition not from the Al Thani Collection, is the Timur Ruby, rather abstractly titled since it is neither a ruby nor was it ever owned by the famous Indian ruler. Now part of the collection of Queen Elizabeth II, the stone was given to Queen Victoria by the East India Company in 1851, and then set in gold, enamel and diamonds by Garrards in 1853. The gem itself demonstrates the significant value placed on these stones by a succession of Mughal rulers, engraved as it is with the names of five royal owners from Jahangir, son of Akbar, in 1612 to Sultan Nadir in 1741.

Contrasting traditional with modern

The Timur Ruby also demonstrates the differing understanding of value that remains central to much of India’s more traditional jewellery making practice. Unlike Western cultures, where brilliance, fire and perfect precision cutting constitute extraordinary gems, the Indian subcontinent holds true (in its more traditional manifestation) to the notion that a stone’s natural character and form – its scale, luminance, colour and clarity – are what defines its beauty.

One of the main techniques that the exhibition focuses on is kundan, the practice of using highly refined gold to set natural, irregular stone shapes within fine, symmetric settings. Its aesthetic is one that has come to define traditional Indian jewellery, and its abandonment by India’s contemporary high jewellers is one of the most notable characteristics of their perceived modernity.

It is the quite clear break with traditional jewellery making practice that the exhibition makes visible, which is one of the show’s most interesting features. Alongside the rejection of traditional setting techniques, it is the widespread preference for platinum (with yellow gold removed to the reverse or interior structure of these new jewels) that has seemed to define “modernity” in contemporary Indian jewellery.

Western influences

Certainly this trend is most evident within the fertile Art Deco period that saw such a volume of commissions from Indian rulers to luxury high jewellery houses in the West  such as Cartier, Boucheron, and more recently JAR, and more recently in contemporary jewellery from India itself.



Image: Gold and diamond hair ornament

Stronge implies that the increased cross-fertilisation with Western tastes has resulted in a loss of regional difference across Indian jewellery, although it's perhaps difficult to conclude about a wider trend from the prism of a very personal selection of objects. It is certainly true that the contemporary jewelers that Al Thani has favoured lean very heavily towards the language of Westernised Indian-ness that Cartier, his Indian clients, and the many other 1920s Western jewellery houses who operated in the country, helped to establish.

The exhibition catalogue relates a lovely vignette of Jacques Cartier’s first visit to India as part of the Delhi Durbar of 1911, marking the coronation of George V as Emperor of India. Cartier had brought, Stronge relates, a selection of jewellery for women, but rapidly realized “the enormous potential of this market was that the princes bought mostly for themselves”.

The legacy of the Al Thani treasures

Perhaps what makes this exhibition so unique in its presentations of high jewellery is that the majority of the pieces chosen have been created to be worn or used by men rather than women, and this in itself is something worth visiting for.

As masculine jewellery cultures diminish so dramatically across the world, the exhibition profiles a dying way of life – both that of the makers, as their traditional arts appear to fade from fashion, and the wearers, and ways of wearing, that these extraordinary gems represent.

The melancholy of autumn seeps in as clouds gather over Paris, temperatures start to fall and the trees turn a rich brown. Fortunately Paris is still the most romantic city in the world, with a fashion for wearing pearls. If you are lucky enough to be in the French capital this Autumn, and are wondering where to go beyond the usual tourist spots, here is a lazy weekend walk through the 6th and 7th arrondissements.

Early Sunday morning is the best time to visit the organic food market on Boulevard Raspail, which is bursting into life. The market is located on Boulevard Raspail between Rue de Cherche-Midi and Rue de Rennes. Be sure to sample one of the galette potato pancakes at the top of the market and immerse yourself in the local Rive Gauche life. Match the fun atmosphere with one of our pearl bracelets.

 

Next turn into the Rue du Cherche-Midi, Rue Saint-Placide and Rue du Bac to discover a string of exclusive fashion boutiques and of course Le Bon Marché. The building of this grand department store was designed by Gustave Eiffel in the middle of the 19th century. Open at the weekends on Saturday only, it is now the home to luxury brands, jewellery, French designers and other essentials for the local French fashionistas. Don't miss La Grand Épicerie with its delicious selection of artisanal groceries, pastries and gifts. It's the perfect place for wearing pearls, perhaps in layers of white Freshwater pearl rope necklaces in the style of Coco Chanel?

 

The world famous Musée Rodin is only a stone's throw away at the end of Rue de Varenne. As its name suggests, the museum is home to a collection of the most significant works by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Wander through the extensive grounds and stop to admire some of Rodin's most famous pieces including ‘The Kiss’ and 'The Thinker'.

 

To finish off your afternoon, amongst the landmarks of the Rive Gauche is the Café Les Deux Magots on the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. For centuries this café has been a cultural hotspot for writers and poets from the world of arts, fashion and literature. Wear something eye-catching like a lustrous pink Freshwater pearl necklace. On a crisp autumn afternoon, find a corner of the glassed-in terrace and sip on a reinvigorating coffee whilst enjoying Parisian life pass slowly by.

 

For dinner there is so much choice in this part of Paris, but Michelin-starred chef Guy Savoy's bistrot Les Bouquinistes is renowned for its sophisticated food and relaxed atmosphere. The restaurant is named after the book-sellers that have been lining the quais of the Seine for over 150 years and today attracts a local clientele of art lovers from the antique shops and galleries nearby. Its location at Quai des Grands Augustins also has a wonderful view at night overlooking the Cathédrale Notre Dame and the Pont-Neuf, a perfect Parisian end to the day.