Photo From left, Richard Avedon photo of Jacqueline de Ribes at the Metropolitan Museum, and Élisabeth Greffulhe, subject of a show at the Palais Galliera in Paris, in a gown and coat lined with Mongolian lamb, about 1886. Credit Richard Avedon/Otto, via Galliera, via Roger-Viollet
Imagine a time before the red carpet.
(Shock, horror, impossible — how did we ever get dressed in the morning? I know, it's asking a lot to even contemplate, but bear with me.)
A time before paid brand ambassadors. A time when we were not schooled, every day, by social media and blogs and people pages and best-dressed lists to believe that how a celebrity looked while making a public and promotional appearance was the paradigm for how everyone should look. A time when fashion role models were not clothed by other people with agendas of their own and did not change their look with the change of a contract. A time when "street style" had not been co-opted by brands themselves, and people actually dressed in their own wardrobes, as opposed t o a wardrobe lent to them for the express purpose of getting photographed in the course of their "real" staged lives.
A time when having your own style was an authentic and necessary goal, and the best way to achieve it was to study the women who had done it themselves. If you could find them.
As awards season looms, starting with the Gotham Independent Film Awards later this month and culminating more than 13 statuette ceremonies later with the Oscars, and we prepare to be inundated with a cascade of dress-like-this red carpet images, that time is worth revisiting.
How to do it, you ask? Get thee to a museum.
This month the Costume Institute at the Met and the Palais Galliera in Paris are unveiling shows dedicated to celebrating and showcasing the eyes and wardrobes of two different private women of extreme style: "La Robe Retrouvée: Les Robes-Trésors de la Comtesse Greffulhe" ("Fashion Regained: The Treasured Dresses of Élisabeth, Countess Greffulhe") at the Paris fashion museum, and "Jacqueline de Ribes: The Art of Style" at the Met.
Is it a coincidence that two of the most important fashion institutions decided to curate directionally similar shows at about the same time? Poss ibly. Or perhaps it's a reaction to the current ethos.
"We always talk about the designers, but rarely about the clients," said Olivier Saillard, director of the Galliera, explaining his choice. But, he said, "it is the clients that may have the most to teach us."
About? "Not buying a lot, but filtering through fashion to find out what is right for you," said Harold Koda, curator in charge at the Costume Institute. The two men were not speaking to each other (they weren't even speaking the same language, and these statements are from entirely different discussions) but they were clearly on the same conceptual page.
The Met show, which has been in the works for eight years, since Mr. Koda and his fellow curator, Andrew Bolton, had lunch with Countess de Ribes in her Paris apartment, includes 60 primarily evening gowns, from the 1960s through the 1990s (before the '60s, Mr. Koda said, Countess de Ribes gave most of her clothes to charity).
One of Truman Capote's original swans, along with Gloria Vanderbilt and Marella Agnelli, Jacqueline de Ribes was famed for her Nefertiti-like profile, immortalized by Richard Avedon, and celebrated for her taste, often collaborating with the couturiers who dressed her so that her clothes would be, Mr. Koda said, labeled "Jacqueline de Ribes for Christian Dior under Marc Bohan."
By 1982, she had her own eponymous clothing business (it closed in 1995), and as one of the first socialites-turned-designers, she paved the way for names like Carolina Herrera and Tory Burch. Her hallmark was, Mr. Koda said, a "kind of idiosyncratic exoticism" marked by saturated colors, rigorous lines, asymmetry and an appreciation for the power of a strategically placed ruffle.
Photo Lavishly embroidered and structured gowns from the turn of the century featured in the exhibition "Fashion Regained: The Treasured Dresses of Élisabeth, Countess Greffulhe," at the Palais Galliera in Paris.
The Galliera exhibition has 50 dresses from couturiers like Charles Frederick Worth, Fortuny and Jeanne Lanvin, which evolve from the lavishly embroidered and structured gowns of the turn of the century to looser, more flowing and feathered pieces, all of which once belonged to the woman who inspired the character of the Duchess of Guermantes in Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time."
As to why … well, look to the clothes. Together the gowns are "about more than fashion," Mr. Saillard said. "They are about a woman who built her own wardrobe to create an identity," one that involved shaping not only the aesthetic tastes of her peers, but also their cultural and political values. The Comtesse de Greffulhe would "say to designer s, 'O.K., show me your whole collection — and now forget that, and do something else,'" Mr. Saillard said.
Pointedly, though the Comtesse de Greffulhe made sartorial waves almost a half-century before Jacqueline de Ribes, both exhibitions are marked by a palpable aesthetic consistency, a timelessness as opposed to a sense of trend, in part because their subjects dressed to please themselves, and to express themselves. Not to make an impact on mobile, or "pop" for the paparazzi.
"These were dresses made not to be shown, but to be worn," Mr. Saillard said of the de Greffulhe wardrobe. Which is not to say the dresses are subtle or retiring (they can be, by contrast, notably dramatic), merely that they are purposeful.
Indeed, though Mr. Koda acknowledged that he had thought of it as the story of the life of a woman of leisure, complete with furniture and art. But when the countess (who is 86), said: "That's not what I was about. From the time I was a child I resisted being put into that box. I wanted to create." Clothes were simply the vehicle and the expression.
"I could see the gowns she had made in the 1980s as part of a sensibility she had been developing all her life," Mr. Koda said.
So there is, for example, a continuum between a shell pink sleeveless Guy Laroche evening column from 1962 with a fuchsia embroidered train (which also had a matching fuchsia e mbroidered coat, but the countess took the coat and combined it with assorted bits and pieces — short sable-trimmed sleeves and bouffant trousers made of tulle from a wholesale fabric seller — for a costume ball in 1969) and a shell pink one-shouldered Jacqueline de Ribes double-faced one-shoulder evening gown with an asymmetric ruffle framing the neck. And it is possible to see the same eye at work in a 1968 couture Yves Saint Laurent salmon jumpsuit with a cock feather ruff at the neck, and a black velvet Jacqueline de Ribes column with white spotted black feathers bristling around the throat from 1986.
"It requires a certain amount of discipline to say, 'This is what's good for me, this is who I am, and whatever trend is out there, I am only going to buy into to the extent I can use it to frame the best portrait of myself,'" Mr. Koda said. "This is all about the reality of a certain kind of life."
And though that kind of life, or both kinds of lives, may seem on the surface a relic of another age, the broader, more abstract lessons of each show — about choosing and thinking for yourself, about understanding the identity you create via clothes and the opportunities therein — are entirely contemporary. More timeless, even, than the dresses themselves.
