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Fashion Show: Paris Style
Susan Ward, Pamela A. Parmal, Didier Grumbach, and Lauren Whitley
The catalog for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's 2006 exhibition on contemporary Paris fashion, making the case that couture belongs among the fine arts. It gathers runway garments from a spring and fall/winter season, moving from avant-garde ready-to-wear (Yohji Yamamoto, Viktor & Rolf, Hussein Chalayan, Maison Martin Margiela, Azzedine Alaïa) to the grand houses of haute couture (Dior, Chanel, Valentino, Christian Lacroix). Alongside lush photography, essays by curators and by Didier Grumbach — then head of Paris's Chambre Syndicale — and designer profiles set the clothes in the context of the city's fashion history and its present-day ferment. It is both a record of a specific museum show and a snapshot of mid-2000s Paris design, aimed at readers who take fashion seriously as material culture and craft rather than mere commerce.
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The authors
The catalog is a collaborative curatorial effort. Susan Ward and Lauren Whitley wrote the designer profiles; Pamela A. Parmal, chair of textiles and fashion arts at the MFA, and Didier Grumbach, then president of the Fédération/Chambre Syndicale that governs Paris couture, contributed the framing essays. The result blends museum scholarship with an insider's view of the industry.
The book
Fashion Show: Paris Style (MFA Publications, 2006) accompanied the exhibition of the same name, presenting garments from ten influential houses across the ready-to-wear and haute-couture spectrum, richly photographed and documented.
How it reads
As an exhibition catalog it does its job well — strong images, informed text, and a clear argument for fashion as art. Being tied to a single 2006 season, it is inevitably a period document: the designers and silhouettes belong to that moment, and the "current state of Paris fashion" it describes has since moved on. For students of fashion history and museum practice, that specificity is a feature; casual readers get a handsome tour of one vivid season on the Paris runways.
For more context
Pair with broader histories of Paris couture and with the MFA's other textile-and-fashion publications.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Susan Ward, Pamela A. Parmal, Didier Grumbach, and Lauren Whitley
- Publisher
- MFA Publications
- Place of publication
- Boston
- Year
- 2006
- ISBN
- 9780878467075
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado