Haute Couture
This exhibition celebrates the art and history of the haute couture, the consummate form of fashion. Every stitch and every detail is made by hand, and the garment is fitted to the particular measure and preference of the client. Couture engages the designer with the client in the traditional manner of patrons of art and architecture. The haute couture was founded in the epoch of a new modernism in the 1850s and 1860s. The invention of the sewing machine and a disposition to uniform sizes and commonalties in dress and visual culture were the natural opposition to couture’s emphatic and deliberately archaic insistence on the handcrafts of fashion. Nonetheless, the haute couture has set the standard of advanced dress for nearly a hundred fifty years.