PARIS — With the 2024 Paris Olympics looming large on the horizon, the town’s fashion museums are warming up by highlighting the interplay between garments and sports.

First out of the gate is the Palais Galliera museum, which explores the influence of physical activity and rise of recent sports on clothing in “La mode en mouvement” (or “Fashion in Motion”), an exhibition drawn from its everlasting collections.

It should run until Sept. 7, 2025, within the museum’s underground Gabrielle Chanel Galleries, and is segmented into three parts to make sure the conservation of fragile garments, with the primary one running until March 15, 2024.

While the upcoming “Fashion and Sport, From One Podium to the Other” exhibition, slated on the Arts Décoratifs from Sept. 20 to April 7, 2024, will retrace sports outfits from antiquity to today’s sportswear through the prism of tennis, skating, soccer and skateboarding, the Palais Galliera’s curatorial team “desired to transcend the connection between fashion and sport, to consider clothing as in relationship with the body and its movements,” said Marie-Laure Gutton, head of Galliera’s accessories collection.

In step with the primary showing of the style museum’s everlasting collections, the exhibition follows a chronological and thematic thread that starts within the 18th century and runs to the current day, highlighting how freeing the body drove the evolution of clothes through some 250 pieces.

“These ideas of physical exertion as [a path to] higher health and a general bettering of society got here to underpin the French social politics and impregnate in our culture, for men but later also for girls,” said Gutton, attributing much of those evolutions to the English aristocratic practice of outside physical activities that spread to continental Europe as these wealthy families moved there.

Starting with 18th century sack-back gowns that required corsets, panniers and padding galore to attain their shape, exhibits explore the look of every decade with layers progressively shed to permit people, women specifically, to walk, ride horses, hunt, then drive, cycle or swim.

Within the early 20^th century, figures like Paul Poiret, Gabrielle Chanel and Jean Patou emerge as proponents of a freer silhouette, first by removing the corset, introducing jersey or shortening hemlines. A promotional fan from Le Bon Marché highlights all of the activities that ladies are encouraged to practice around 1910 — and the outfits they may buy on the department store to accomplish that.

By the Fifties, couturiers like Elsa Schiaparelli embraced sportswear of their ready-to-wear lines and within the Nineteen Sixties, between miniskirts and the “atome” two-piece swimsuit from French designer Jacques Heim — often forgotten in favor of the bikini, its more famous rival that got here the identical yr — the emancipation of bodies, mostly female, was accomplished.

Closer to the current day, the Eighties were a period where “fashion that becomes more conscious of reality [such as the AIDS and financial crises] and at the identical time, we’re moving towards a more athletic, aestheticized body with fitness,” said Gutton, with stylized silhouettes by Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana juxtaposed with looks by Sonia Rykiel, a rhinestone-adorned lace jogger set, and Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo, with a fluidly draped dress.

Epitomizing the Nineteen Nineties’ fusion of high fashion and sports is a shiny sequined Chanel suit from 1991 modeled after a rash guard and board shorts, as seen on Linda Evangelista.

Closing the exhibition are a trio of silhouettes from the early 21^st century, “where the link between fashion, sports, sportswear is an excellent bubble where every little thing is mixed,” with a glance drawn from the wardrobe of Sarah Andelman, the previous creative director of Colette credited with giving the sneaker its fashion credentials; Olivier Rousteing’s post-lockdown outfit, mask and all, and a fall 2001 design by Yohji Yamamoto, which prefigured the launch of Y-3 and the appearance of designer streetwear.  

A Paris-Saint-Germain soccer jersey, bearing Dior ambassador and star player Kylian Mbappé’s number 10 position, brings the exhibition “full circle, as we began with on a regular basis clothing used for sporting activities and we end with sports garments utilized in on a regular basis life – without even being transformed or adjusted in any way,” said Gutton, to whom in addition they represent a desire for community but in addition the incontrovertible fact that sports stars have turn into fashion icons.

Owing to their position as an omnipresent fashion phenomenon, sneakers are given their very own section, with models starting from Converse’s Chuck Taylor All Star, the primary basketball shoe made in 1923, to designer kicks including the 2004 Balenciaga style from Nicolas Ghesquière’s tenure to designs by Valentino in addition to Sacai’s Nike collaboration and the one between Rick Owens and Adidas.

As companions to the three chapters of “La Mode en Mouvement,” displays on autochrome color imagery, swimwear and winter sports shall be shown within the curved gallery also situated on the lower level and shall be rotated along side each segment.

The primary, “Les Couleurs de la Mode” (“The Colours of Fashion”), is devoted to Autochrome Lumière images, a posh and expensive artisanal process that’s an ancestor of color photography developed by the Lumière brothers.

Recently discovered at Paris’ science and technology Musée des Arts et Métiers, these images dedicated to fashion were captured between 1921 and 1923 for the Salon du Goût Français (or “Exhibition of French Taste”), a showcase of French luxury products meant to support the country’s economy after World War I.

“What’s unprecedented for us fashion historians is seeing the style of the time in color since there was no process. There was black-and-white photography or illustration, but color photography was still a long time away,” said Sylvie Lécallier, head of Galliera’s photographic collection.

Highlighted in these images are the sorts of the day but in addition “the finesse of every fabric, the feel, every little thing that we read within the press of the time but suddenly turn into perceptible, almost palpable through this [photographic] process,” continued the photography expert.

“In 2023, we’ll see 1923” proclaimed a poster for the traveling exhibition of French crafts. “So we just went with what the organizers of the time intended,” Lécallier quipped.