Time Travel in Costume.

I have never seen anything like it. No display cases. No gallery of costume. No shop. No guidebooks. No Book Of The Exhibition. This house is simply full of beautifully dressed people socialising. Sadly all the sumptuously dressed people are wax and plastic, but the clothes glow and shimmer with life….

I am in Avallon in France and the building is a town house dating from the 17^th century. Each year the sisters who own this treasure chest mount a completely new exhibition. This year’s theme is ‘Le pouvoir des fleurs dans la mode’ …Flower power in fashion.

You ring the bell at the gate and an elegant lady opens a door across the courtyard and beckons you inside. The house takes your breath away before you see as much as a ruffle. This is what history looks like..never mind Alice and her rabbit hole..I feel as if I have just stepped back hundreds of years. Stone flagged floors, paintings, maps, drawings all struggle for space on the walls and the sweeping marble staircase (oh to be wearing a ball gown and walk down that in candlelight). Doorways have heavy curtaining swagged and draped round them. There are internal small paned windows from the corridors into the rooms.
Antique cabinets line the corridor walls. These are packed with snuff boxes, smelling salt bottles and the like. To show you their contents Madame retrieves a torch from the drawer of a magnificent sideboard and shines it in to the cabinet, pointing out a chain hung with silver seals.

Then into the rooms. Oh the rooms. Needs must the light levels are low. The lights are switched on in each room as you go through the door and Madame switches them off as you exit. Each room transports you to a different time. All the rooms are lavishly furnished and crammed full of paintings and ornaments.

Some rooms have huge cupboards that are opened to show you a wealth of bodices, shoes, fans, hats 

and bags tucked inside. A single strip of cellophane lies across the bottom shelf for protection…. 

And of course there are the clothes. Each room is dressed and set as a different social occasion. At the end of the downstairs corridor we climb a second marble staircase…to more of the same upstairs. The rooms have high ceilings and wooden panelling.

             

           

     

                                             

One door leads onto a gallery overlooking a chapel. All trompe d’oeil Madame says …built in the mediaeval style in the 19^th century when this house was a boy’s school. 

      

Down the grand front staircase and back to the hall. And that is it.

But of course the costumes. I did not make notes of age, material or provenance…My jaw had dropped so far I couldn’t have written if I had tried. Besides, I was trying to take as many photos as I could and translate the 1001 questions I had into French. My photos are not wonderful, no flash obviously, but there are other better photos to be found online, if you so wish.

So here is a selection of what I saw. Never before have I felt so strongly that I was actually there, part of the tea parties and receptions and cocktail party tableaux of beautifully dressed people enjoying themselves, me being simply a time travelling mouche on the wall…..

Museum of Costume

6 rue Belgrand

89200 Avallon

Yonne. France

Tel 03 86 34 19 95

Open every day 15^th April to 1^st November, from 1030 to 1230 and 1300 to 1730.