The style tropes of the Parisienne have long been admired, copied and even lamented. But at one time in history, there was also the Arlésienne — her southern counterpart, who developed a mode of dress just as unique to her postcode. Now she gets her moment in the limelight with the opening of a new private museum, the Fragonard Musée de la Mode et du Costume, on July 6.
Fronted by a young curator, 37-year-old Arles native Clément Trouche, with interiors designed by in-demand Parisian architects Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty of Studio KO, the new address amps up the city’s reputation as a cultural destination, alongside the Rencontres d’Arles photography fair and the Luma Arles, the centre for contemporary art with its soaring Frank Gehry tower.
“Between French fashion worn at court and regional costumes, there was the Arlésienne costume . . . these women were more modern and fashionable than was reasonable,” says Trouche, who with his jaw-grazing haircut, unbuttoned shirt and stylish sneakers looks more like a hip interior architect than a fashion historian. He recounts an archival inventory of a baker’s wife’s wardrobe, which included 105 skirts. “I don’t even have 105 pairs of trousers at home, do you?” he says. “The women here had a taste for fashion that went beyond their wealth.”
Remarkably, the local traditional garb — corset and all — can still be seen on the streets. On any given day, you might encounter women in full dress strolling about, particularly during the annual costume parade and the election of the Queen of Arles, a two-day competition involving interviews and knowledge tests for young women hoping to be elected as the city’s ambassador.
“If a woman decides to dress up as an Arlésienne for dinner, she’s like a different person, it gives her confidence,” says Trouche on why young women still embrace petticoats and a corset. The Arlésienne style has enticed contemporary fashion designers, too, most famously Christian Lacroix and also Alessandro Michele, who transported a Gucci Cruise show to the city’s Roman necropolis in 2019. Lacroix, a local, was captivated by the figure — whom he once called “the ideal of femininity” — and the transformative power of costume.
“Our reason for being here is that this is a city that keeps traditional costumes alive,” says Fragonard’s Agnès Costa. The museum showcases the collection of Costa’s mother, the late Hélène Costa, who established the Provençal Museum of Costume and Jewellery in Grasse in 1997, where the fragrance brand Maison Fragonard is based. These pieces feature alongside the life’s work of the late local historian and academic Magali Pascal.
Together with her daughter Odile, a costume and jewellery historian and former Queen of Arles, Pascal established one of the world’s most significant fashion collections. “We are not mixing two collections, we are adding layers,” Costa says of the archives, which now total around 10,000 items and offer a near-complete overview of French fashion from the 18th to the 20th centuries, from the grand dresses of the beau monde in all their finery and formality to their Arlésienne adaptations. “Magali was more of an art and fashion historian, and my mother was only interested in Provençal style,” Costa says. “For her, it was about cultural preservation of tradition, but not just the highest part of society.”
Far from provincial, local women once rivalled Parisians for their originality. In Roman times and beyond, Arles and the nearby Rhône river were geographically crucial for trade. Later, textiles arrived from India, the Levant, and the Far East — a vibrant array of fabrics rich in colour and prints, such as the decorative block print still popular today, which made the Arlésiennes formidable fashion plates.
In their expression of style, Arlésiennes also developed unique dressing gestures, developing a signature silhouette assembled from layers of garments, pleated and pinned to the bodice of their dress to create generous volumes. The silhouette became singular, codified and instantly recognisable.
The inaugural exhibition, Collections-Collection, features a commissioned video work by French portrait photographer Charles Fréger, which illustrates this tradition-bound ritual. A series of vignettes featuring local women, many of whom are former queens of Arles, illustrate the two-hour process step by step. It begins with styling an elaborate, architectural up-do, built around a comb and finished with the signature ribbon. Then comes the ensemble, composed of around 10 items of clothing, from underwear, including corsets, to the final fichu. This lace-embellished, decorative shawl covers the bodice and builds up the bust.
For the opening, more than 40 silhouettes are displayed on mannequins, including an emblematic local dress that dates to the late 19th century, when Vincent van Gogh flâneured about the city’s narrow streets. The green and yellow woven silk wool ensemble showcases that period’s popular S-shaped form and is styled with a voluminous lace-trimmed fichu and a long bicolour satin hair ribbon that trails down the back. Trouche says it represents local fashion at its most elaborate epoch.
Another sun-drenched yellow dress from Marseille, an 18th-century textile masterpiece cut from a block-print fabric manufactured by a factory in Jouy-en-Josas near Paris, suggests that fashion has always favoured the daring. “Clothes in particular tell the story of women; this was their language, at a time when they had so little influence, and so little was recorded of their lives,” says Trouche. “To see how a simple woman, who had such a taste for colour and beautiful fabrics and for pomp, could have used such a fabric. She clearly had the desire to say, ‘Look at me in this.’” All fashions come and go, but that sentiment will always ring true.