The designer retrospectives
Chanel, Alaïa, Vivienne Westwood — when Galliera honours a designer, pieces leave the archives that surface once a generation.
Joe deSousa — CC0 · Danilo Samà · www.danilosama.ph — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Gary Todd from Xinzheng, China — CC0 · Gary Todd from Xinzheng, China — CC0
Galliera in the morning, the free Modern Art museum opposite, lunch at the Palais de Tokyo, then Avenue Montaigne's flagship houses fifteen minutes' walk away — a complete Paris fashion day.
Textiles degrade under light and suspension; earlier centuries' pieces cannot survive permanent display — rotation protects the collection, which is what makes each show unrepeatable.
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In the world's fashion capital, this is fashion's official museum: the Palais Galliera, the City of Paris fashion museum, in a neoclassical palace an Italian duchess built in the 1880s — fate turning it into a wardrobe of two hundred thousand pieces, from Marie-Antoinette's gowns to contemporary couture, from Empress Joséphine's closet to the archives of Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga and the twentieth century's icons. Because textiles are fragile there is no conventional permanent gallery: the museum stages successive themed exhibitions — a great designer's retrospective, an era, a fashion phenomenon — alongside a semi-permanent fashion-history display in the vaulted lower rooms, from the 18th century to now. Check what's on before visiting; the big shows here book out like seasonal events. Its location is a bonus: opposite the free Museum of Modern Art and the Palais de Tokyo, minutes from the Trocadéro views — the perfect side of a "fashion and modern art" 16th-arrondissement day.
Chanel, Alaïa, Vivienne Westwood — when Galliera honours a designer, pieces leave the archives that surface once a generation.
From 18th-century corsetry to 20th-century revolutions in the vaulted lower galleries — a dense visual lesson in three centuries of elegance.
Neoclassical colonnades and a small garden with a distant Eiffel view — an elegant pause worthy of the museum's subject.
Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie, 75116 Paris