There's more or less three weeks to go before the Oscar ceremony takes place, while next Tuesday it is Carnival, the festive celebration preceding Lent. If you fancy reuniting cinematic dreams with the exuberance of masked parades, head to the Prato Textile Museum.
From tomorrow (till 27th May) the museum will host the exhibition "I costumi di una regina da Oscar" (The Costumes of an Academy Award Queen). As you may have guessed from the title, the event is dedicated to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.
Love or hate the film and its subject, it is impossible to deny that its costumes, designed by Milena Canonero, were fascinating. The costume designer won her third Oscar for the film that featured historical creations in the style of the 18th century.
For this film Milena Canonero created around 170 costumes, 100 of them were destined to the protagonist Kirsten Dunst in the role of the teen queen. Canonero embarked on a long research before the tailoring houses started working on the costumes: she studied the paintings of the time, replicating styles, borrowing colour palettes and enriching her pieces with embroidered elements and details.
The exhibition complements another event still on at the museum "Caprice and Reason" (until 29th April) that mainly features pieces from the 1700s. The juxtaposition of real garments and fabrics from the 18th century next to their cinematic reinterpretations will offer the museum visitors the chance to make comparisons and learn more about the process of recreating a historical garment for the big screen.
The main hope of the museum curators is indeed to show that history and cultural heritage can inspire the creative industries and in particular the performing arts, helping to give them new vitality, energies and inspirations.
The exhibition includes both men and women's costumes donned by the main characters and opens with a section dedicated to Marie Antoinette with a multimedia installation about her life, the social context in which she lived and her passion for fashion. The best French artisans contributed to create via their sumptuous garments, elegant accessories, extravagant wigs and precious jewels her image. Her style was soon adopted not only by the noblewomen of Versailles, but also by women living in other European courts. There are plenty of corsets and petticoats in this section that also includes the pink dress donned by Kirsten Dunst on the September 2006 cover of US Vogue in a shoot dedicated to the film by Annie Liebovitz.
The biggest room of the museum includes over twenty costumes from the archives of Rome-based Sartoria The One, such as the winter dress donned by the protagonist as she leaves the Vienna court and the gown with a tight corset and a double pannier skirt seen in the dressing scene.
Film fans will also spot in this room the costumes donned by Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI for the incoronation (the most elaborate pieces in the exhibition) and the dresses used for the meetings with Count Axel Fersen and with Comtesse du Barry and for the royal flight from Versailles.
The exhibition design features architectures evoking the ample and rich rooms of Versailles, plus projections of outdoor gardens calling to mind the Trianon.
A rich calendar of events accompanies the exhibition: the activities dedicated to families are actually the best ones with dubbing laboratories of animated manga series "Versailles no Bara" (Lady Oscar) and "La Seine no Hoshi" (Star of the Seine) and tactile workshops dedicated to kids focusing on 1700s fabrics. They sound like the sort of activities a teen queen may have approved of.
"Marie Antoinette. The Costumes of an Academy Award Queen" is at the Prato Textile Museum, via Puccetti 3, Prato, Italy, 11th February - 27th May 2018.
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