Palais Galliera Explores Bodies in Motion Ahead of Olympics – WWD

PARIS — With the 2024 Paris Olympics looming large on the horizon, the city’s fashion museums are warming up by highlighting the interplay between garments and sports.

First out of the gate is the Palais Galliera museum, which explores the influence of physical activity and rise of modern sports on clothing in “La mode en mouvement” (or “Fashion in Motion”), an exhibition drawn from its permanent collections.

It will run until Sept. 7, 2025, in the museum’s underground Gabrielle Chanel Galleries, and is segmented into three parts to ensure the conservation of fragile garments, with the first one running until March 15, 2024.

While the upcoming “Fashion and Sport, From One Podium to the Other” exhibition, slated at the Arts Décoratifs from Sept. 20 to April 7, 2024, will retrace sports outfits from antiquity to today’s sportswear through the prism of tennis, skating, soccer and skateboarding, the Palais Galliera’s curatorial team “wanted to go beyond the connection between fashion and sport, to think of clothing as in relationship with the body and its movements,” said Marie-Laure Gutton, head of Galliera’s accessories collection.

In keeping with the first showing of the fashion museum’s permanent collections, the exhibition follows a chronological and thematic thread that starts in the 18th century and runs to the present day, highlighting how freeing the body drove the evolution of garments through some 250 pieces.

“These ideas of physical exercise as [a path to] better health and a general bettering of society came to underpin the French social politics and impregnate in our culture, for men but later also for women,” said Gutton, attributing much of these evolutions to the English aristocratic practice of outdoor physical activities that spread to continental Europe as these wealthy families moved there.

Starting with 18th century sack-back gowns that required corsets, panniers and padding galore to achieve their shape, exhibits explore the look of each decade with layers progressively shed to allow people, women in particular, to walk, ride horses, hunt, then drive, cycle or swim.

In the early 20^th century, figures like Paul Poiret, Gabrielle Chanel and Jean Patou emerge as proponents of a freer silhouette, first by removing the corset, introducing jersey or shortening hemlines. A promotional fan from Le Bon Marché highlights all the activities that women are encouraged to practice around 1910 — and the outfits they could buy at the department store to do so.

By the 1950s, couturiers like Elsa Schiaparelli embraced sportswear in their ready-to-wear lines and in the 1960s, between miniskirts and the “atome” two-piece swimsuit from French designer Jacques Heim — often forgotten in favor of the bikini, its more famous rival that came the same year — the emancipation of bodies, mostly female, was completed.

Closer to the present day, the 1980s were a period where “fashion that becomes more conscious of reality [such as the AIDS and financial crises] and at the same time, we are moving towards a more athletic, aestheticized body with fitness,” said Gutton, with stylized silhouettes by Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana juxtaposed with looks by Sonia Rykiel, a rhinestone-adorned lace jogger set, and Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo, with a fluidly draped dress.

Epitomizing the 1990s’ fusion of high fashion and sports is a sparkly sequined Chanel suit from 1991 modeled after a rash guard and board shorts, as seen on Linda Evangelista.

Closing the exhibition are a trio of silhouettes from the early 21^st century, “where the link between fashion, sports, sportswear is a great bubble where everything is mixed,” with a look drawn from the wardrobe of Sarah Andelman, the former creative director of Colette credited with giving the sneaker its fashion credentials; Olivier Rousteing’s post-lockdown outfit, mask and all, and a fall 2001 design by Yohji Yamamoto, which prefigured the launch of Y-3 and the advent of designer streetwear.  

A Paris-Saint-Germain soccer jersey, bearing Dior ambassador and star player Kylian Mbappé’s number 10 position, brings the exhibition “full circle, as we started with everyday clothing used for sporting activities and we end with sports garments used in everyday life – without even being transformed or adjusted in any way,” said Gutton, to whom they also represent a desire for community but also the fact that sports stars have become fashion icons.

Owing to their position as an omnipresent fashion phenomenon, sneakers are given their own section, with models ranging from Converse’s Chuck Taylor All Star, the first basketball shoe made in 1923, to designer kicks including the 2004 Balenciaga style from Nicolas Ghesquière’s tenure to designs by Valentino as well as Sacai’s Nike collaboration and the one between Rick Owens and Adidas.

As companions to the three chapters of “La Mode en Mouvement,” displays on autochrome color imagery, swimwear and winter sports will be shown in the curved gallery also located on the lower level and will be rotated in conjunction with each segment.

The first, “Les Couleurs de la Mode” (“The Colors of Fashion”), is dedicated to Autochrome Lumière images, a complex and costly artisanal process that is an ancestor of color photography developed by the Lumière brothers.

Recently discovered at Paris’ science and technology Musée des Arts et Métiers, these images dedicated to fashion were captured between 1921 and 1923 for the Salon du Goût Français (or “Exhibition of French Taste”), a showcase of French luxury products meant to support the country’s economy after World War I.

“What is unprecedented for us fashion historians is seeing the fashion of the time in color since there was no process. There was black-and-white photography or illustration, but color photography was still decades away,” said Sylvie Lécallier, head of Galliera’s photographic collection.

Highlighted in these images are the styles of the day but also “the finesse of each fabric, the texture, everything that we read in the press of the time but suddenly become perceptible, almost palpable through this [photographic] process,” continued the photography expert.

“In 2023, we’ll see 1923” proclaimed a poster for the traveling exhibition of French crafts. “So we just went with what the organizers of the time intended,” Lécallier quipped.