Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs celebrates avant-garde jewellery design

Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs explores the dialogue between three creative categories in its permanent collection galleries dedicated to modern design.

Transdisciplinary exhibitions are an exciting way to learn about shared ideas across categories. A recent model juxtaposing two disciplines, fashion and art, is Traversing Appearances – When fashion enters the Musée National d’Art Moderne, on view at the Pompidou Centre in Paris till April 22. A dialogue involving three, however, is obviously much more complex. Boldly embracing this “trio” formula is Fashion, Design, Jewellery Exhibit, now showing at the city’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

The museum, which boasts of the vast collection of applied art from the medieval period through today, has experience in staging two-dimensional shows. For example, shortly after the passing of Karl Lagerfeld in 2019, several looks by the designer were added to the modern period section within the permanent collection galleries, including his creation for Chloé from the 1980’s, showcased in the middle Memphis furniture. The site’s huge costume archives are always the great source to choose the right pieces to illustrate the respective themes. The institution’s jewellery gallery is also expanding with new acquisitions.

For Fashion, Design, Jewellery Exhibit, Mathieu Rousset-Perrier, who is in charge of the Musée des Arts Decoratifs’s Medieval, Renaissance and Jewellery Collection, was one of six curators from different departments of the museum. “We were seeking a way to pay tribute to the donations of the last fifteen years, in parallel with the regular itinerary of the design section”, he says. “In whichever discipline, creatives are curious and look at what the others are doing. Very often they build solid friendship, not to mention Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparell. They were respectively surrounded by the artists, authors, poets and musicians. Designers and creators are influenced by everybody and everything interesting”, explains Rousset-Perrier how creative threads expand indefinitely and sometimes develop into artistic movement.

Spreading over five floors (level 5 to 9 of Pavillon de Marsan of the museum), thirty- something costumes and about one hundred jewels enrich the design collection spanning from the 20th century to the present day. The selection is free of hierarchy: Haute-couture or ready-to-wear, and fine jewellery or costume jewellery, is not the important criterion, which is rare in terms of museology. Twenty groups are formed around the same inspiration or style, or simply the period, either by interactive influence or coincidence.

The first spotlighted design of the show is Marc Newson’s Pod of Drawers cabinet. It is accompanied by two gorgeously embroidered jackets, one of which is paired with the bustier dress, created by Olivier Rousting for his first collection of the house of Balmain in 2012. A dozen pieces of Art Deco jewellery by the emblematic French goldsmith Jean Després completes the installation. Here, the inspirations were not exactly the same, neither the period. Instead, the parallels are found in the metallic luminosity and geometric lines, which reminds of the Streamline Modern style. Another highlight features Charlotte Perriand.

“Through the research for the show, we perceived Perriand’s close tie with Jean Lurçat, not only artistically but also politically. Both communist, they even travelled together to Moscow in 1936. It is a small anecdote but not initeresting”, says Rousset-Perrier. For this installation, the selected work of Lurçat is a series of gold jewellery, not the whimsical and colourful tapestry for which he is known. On the last floor, the organic forms, dull glow and coal black shade link Rick Owens’s ensemble, Finnish designer Inari Kiuru’s jewellery and the luminous object by Czech duo Stanislas Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova.

Visitors can spot design references by the iconic names such as Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, Jean Royère, Martin Szekely and so on, displayed with looks by Christian Dior by John Galliano, Courrèges by Nicolas di Felice, Helmut Lang, Paco Rabanne, Stéphane Rolland as well as the artist Jean Dubuffet who created the theater costume. Alongside jewellery gems by the prestigious maisons like Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, also by Jean Schlumberger, who seduced the Swans by his work for Tiffany & Co., a necklace and rings by furniture designer Ettore Sottsass are a true discovery. “We are excited to see how visitors react to this new perspective on the designs”, adds Rousset-Perrier who is impatient to hear the feedback.

'Fashion, Design, Jewellery Exhibit' is at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs until November 10 2024

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