Lacroix, La Coeur de la Couture.

I went to the Christian Lacroix: The Couturier exhibition today. It's hard to explain how excited I was, and I really did love the exhibition - went through it twice! And I don't suppose that was enough. Thankfully, the exhibition lasts until mid-June.

In any case, I took a handful of photos, but I won't show them all here because it wouldn't be fair to those who haven't seen the exhibition. What I can show is one of what I feel is the best photo out of the many I took:



The real reason why I am writing this post, however, can be found in what Lacroix said in a 1998 interview with L'Journal d'ESMOD about his work with costumes in theatre:

"On stage, everything is symbol, effect, illusion; the costume must speak from the moment the actors, dancers or singers set foot on stage, assisting them physically by being comfortable, but also spiritually by underlining their acting and their role's character."

In a contemporary world where art has long stepped beyond the threshold of postmodernism, one wonders if the elaborate costumes of Lacroix still hold any more relevance to art. What has the avant-garde movement taught us? What can it still teach us? Does avant-garde still have anything to teach us?

Today, the stages of theatre are all minimalist - they are all barren theatrical deserts in a stark, clinical white, with perhaps the occasional block to perhaps represent a chair, a table, or even a rock. Even period pieces are rife with anachronisms; a recent production of Pride & Prejudice that I watched featured spot-on period costumes, but a suspended series of empty, black photo frames; during the interval, characters in their Victorian garb swirled onto stage, and then proceeded to dance in a contemporary, Broadway fashion.

It seems almost impossible for us to understand history without reinterpreting it into our own terms. We don't even understand the eighteenth century any more - not without pretending that Darcy and Elizabeth lived in the twentieth century. The world that has broken itself free from tradition is now hopping along at a supersonic pace, seemingly fixed on an irreversible path towards the eternalisation of history in fanciful photowork, plastic replicas, and scripted tours.

The real irony of modern museums is this: in our quest to resurrect history, we have injected our own plastics into its veins and vested it in our own synthetic fabrics, but history ultimately remains a dead, lifeless corpse.