31 March-28 June 2009, Versailles Palace
This exhibition will be held in the Palace from april to june 2009 with the collaboration of Pascale Gorguet-Ballesteros, curator at Galliera, the Museum of Fashion of the city of Paris. Called “Splendour of Court and Royal Ceremonies” this exhibition will include for the first time more than 200 works coming from the most important European museums and royal collections (London, Dresden, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Vienna, Moscow etc). The exhibition relates the history of costume in European courts and highlights the major influence of France in this area from 1650 to the beginning of the 19th century. This event is part of the cycle of exhibition evokink the Court life in Early modern time as was the exhibition “Versailles and the Royal tables in Europe” in 1993-1994.
For the same time, in June 3-4-5 th, an international symposium will be held in Versailles on the “Material & Visual Cultures of Dress in European Courts from the end of the Middle Age to the beginning of the 19th century”. The field of study of the symposium bears on two topics that are closely linked : the material culture and the visual culture. First it aims to study the reigning princes and sovereigns’ sartorial culture through the clothes themselves, as they have been kept in museums, or/and through the inventories, accounts of wardrobes and bills. It also aims to study the various iconographical representations of princes and courtiers. They contribute to the construction of a of an elites’ sartorial visual culture whose place should be assessed in the increase in the number of fashion plates from the early modern era. These topics will continue until our present-day so we can study the dress at court or more widely the old luxurious clothes through the fashion and the visual culture of the stage (theatre, opera), cinema or TV.
