{"id":106204,"date":"2016-12-26T17:00:23","date_gmt":"2016-12-26T22:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106204"},"modified":"2016-12-27T11:07:10","modified_gmt":"2016-12-27T16:07:10","slug":"fashion-regained-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/26\/fashion-regained-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Fashion Regained"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 3, but we\u2019re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Comtesse \u00c9lisabeth Greffulhe.<\/p><\/div>\n

Looking for Proust\u2019s muse in Paris.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After making a careful study of contemporary fashion plates, Baudelaire came to the conclusion that one couldn\u2019t examine clothes apart from the individual wearing them. \u201cYou might as well admire the tattered rags hung up as slack and lifeless as the skin of St. Bartholomeu,\u201d he wrote in his essay \u201cIn Praise of Cosmetics.\u201d In order to \u201crecover the light and movement of life,\u201d clothes needed to be animated by a living body, and it was only on this living body that they were to be understood. One wonders what he would\u2019ve made of the nascent trend of the fashion exhibition, in which the fashions of yesteryear appear on mannequins, those motionless abstractions of the human figure.<\/p>\n

\u201cLa Mode retrouv\u00e9e<\/a>,\u201d now at the Mus\u00e9e de la Mode in Paris, and coming in September to New York, uses clothes as a sort of Pompeiian ash in order to sketch the person who once filled them out. In this case, it\u2019s the Comtesse \u00c9lisabeth Greffulhe (1860\u20131952), who was by reputation the most fashionable woman of her time. At her salon on the Rue d\u2019Astorg, an integral part of the political and artistic milieux, she arranged for what was thought to be the impossible Russian-Franco alliance, as well as the reception of Faur\u00e9, Wagner, Isadora Duncan, and the Ballets Russes in Paris. Historians of the era have argued that no patron did more for music than she. And this at a time when, no matter the fact that she was married into wealth and rank, she had neither rights nor property as her own, as was the case for all women under the civil code of the Third Republic.<\/p>\n

Read More >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking for Proust\u2019s muse in Paris.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":826,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26379],"tags":[21546,21548,21547,538,865,18212,21552,3346,21550,21553,575,21549,270,21551,10601],"class_list":["post-106204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2016","tag-comtesse-elisabeth-greffulhe","tag-dresses","tag-elisabeth-greffulhe","tag-fashion","tag-france","tag-gowns","tag-high-society","tag-isadora-duncan","tag-la-mode-retrouvee","tag-laure-hillerin","tag-marcel-proust","tag-musee-de-la-mode","tag-paris","tag-society","tag-stephane-mallarme"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLa Mode Retrouv\u00e9e: Looking for Proust\u2019s Muse in Paris<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Madison Mainwaring on Comtesse \u00c9lisabeth Greffulhe, an inspiration to Proust whose elaborate 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