Focus: "Roman d'une garde robe" (Novel of a wardrobe)

I choose to tell you about an exemple of an exhibition I saw in Carnavalet Museum (Museum of City of Paris History)

This exhibition presents us the story of Alice Alleaume, a Parisian woman, and the mixing of Alice's wardrobe, professional and personal life which frames fashion moments of the Parisian chic. She was, indeed, first saleswoman at Cheruit. We follow her path through 4 important stages in her life.

The first section presents years of learning and family influence which take her towards the fashion world. The second section evokes the fashion parisian background in the area of the Place Vendôme and the Rue de la Paix. The third section, heart of the exhition, focuses on the Alice Alleaume career in the Cheruit House. The room dedicaded to Alice's business engagement with Cheruit captures the creative production in detail and her business ethic. Finally, the last section devoted to the 1930's reveals the great taste and the originality of this elegant woman , who incarnated the parisian chic.

This exhibition shows pieces from Carnavalet museum and the Galliera museum, which acquired the collection in 2008. It's the first time what it is exhibited.

We can admire some 400 exceptional pieces, designer dresses Chéruit, Worth and Lanvin, evening shoes of Hellstem, hats of Alphonsine, Marcelle Demay, Madeleine Panizon, Le Monnier, evening headbands of Rose Descat, jewels...We found also manuscripts and documents: sale notebooks and customer list (wherre she wrote everyday the details of her sales, the retouchs to make, and even the measurements of her rich customers.), the deposit of models, completed by textiles samples, painting and print of the Carnavalet museum which evoke the Rue de la Paix et the Place Vendôme, luxe temple, befor First World War, as well as personal photos that reveal Alice's personal style, taste, elegance and feminity.

The scenography:

Dresses of Alice and her family, are presenting in several rooms linked, without outside light. The museography is modern and presents clothes and documents from the end of the 19^th century to the Golden Twenties (« Les années folles »), on colourful walls and in dispaly cabinets.

In a small room, we can listen womens who are reading letters from Alice Alleaume and her correspondents. On the walls, we found a lot of photos of outfit. Below, there are screens on which we see pass through photos and videos. These fashion illustrations, which were mostly featured in the magazine la Gazette du Bon, indirectly recalling pony steps of the fashion retail and marketing.

On the walls, throughout the exhibition, the path is punctuated of Alice's sentences, or fashion references.

Preservation and presentation:

All of the works which are exhibited here, first of all textiles, but also archive documents, drawings, original pictures from which they are sensitive to climatic variation and light. This one is limited. Works are not very enlightened (max 50lux)

Clothes are in display cabinets, on dummies. Several types of dummy are used:

• chest dummy, without head and arms. These are for clothes which don't need a great staging
• classics dummy coloured grey, standardized. These ones reproduce a certain body movement, a fashion posture. It is used for charleston dresses (from the Golden Twenties), present with accessories.
• Dummy are made to fit for each garments: in particular for dresses of the end of the 19^th century which are not adapted for a classic dummy and should be alter correctly to the dummy.

Some fabric or costume elements should be present at flat . Shoes are reshaped by padding of adapt material. Hats are installed on specific support.

We found at the end of the exhibition, artificial flowers. A video shows us the restoration and the reshape of flowers for their future preservation in preservation specific boxes, or for their exhibition, like here.


This exhibition is very interresting because it shows the life of a Parisian. We aren't interested only in clothes, but also in what is around, the context. Through Alice's life, it's all a

time that we admire. Unintentionally, the exhibition also shows a wider image of women in the early modern society, primarily we see the social position and social standing of Alice and her family.

The collection possess an important patrimonial character and an great esthetic quality. But it tells above all a story of a family, a Parisian, a fashion house and composes the novel of a wardrobe.

Video of the exhibition in french