L’Impressionnisme et la Mode at the Musée d’Orsay

Scores of gilded Second Empire chairs line both sides of long red-carpeted galleries, just as they traditionally lined the showrooms of Paris haute couture houses. Each chair has a name tag, written in elegant 19th-century cursive script: Jules Verne, Sarah Bernhardt, Jacques Offenbach, Mary Garden, Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, Liane de Pougy, Guy de Maupassant…a roster of literary, artistic, musical and intellectual Parisian society, the beau and the demi-monde from the 1860s to the 1880s. The illustrious ghosts have the front-row seats for the superb group portrait of their own era offered by L’Impressionnisme et la Mode, the sumptuous new exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay.

The show’s 80 paintings and watercolors by Impressionist artists and a few contemporaries—notably Manet, Monet, Renoir, Morisot, James Tissot and Alfred Stevens, but also Bazille, Caillebotte, Carolus-Duran, Degas and Fantin-Latour—are vividly fleshed out with a wondrous array of fashionable attire: day and evening wear, hats, shoes, gloves, fans and frilly underthings, all garnered from the fashion collections of the Musée Galliera and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

The full complement of ladies’ latest looks traces the style shift from hoopskirts and crinolines to straighter lines with exaggerated bustles—but wasp-waisted all the while. But even more than the silhouettes it’s the fabrics that stand out—cotton and linen in transparent, striped or flower-sprigged muslin or lawn, silk in satins and taffetas, pleated, pouffed, ruched and trimmed with soutache, beaded fringe or lace. As the show makes clear, with such lushly painted works as Renoir ’s Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children, the Impressionists reveled in the play of light on the fine fabrics and froufrou.

Albert Bartholomé’s portrait of his wife In The Greenhouse, shown beside the real striped and polka-dotted dress she wore, is the only exact matchup. But the number of near lookalikes in paintings and clothing is astonishing.

The linkup between the Impressionists and fashion is a natural. Fashion was just coming into its own in their world of mid-19th-century modernity. Along with steam engines and paint in portable tubes, the first department stores were making their debuts, and so were the first haute couture houses—pioneer couturier Charles Frederick Worth opened in 1858—along with ready-made clothes and fashion magazines, including the short-lived La Dernière Mode—designed, written and produced singlehandedly by poet Stéphane Mallarmé.

It’s a tour de force of a show, beautifully staged by theater and opera director Robert Carsen (who also designed the big Bohèmes exhibition currently at the Grand Palais). In the two fashion-show galleries, those ghostly empty chairs are facing six towering, larger-than-life portraits of elegantly dressed women, each reflected in wall-size mirrors.

Other galleries are set up like salons or shop windows. Music overheard in one of the first galleries might be coming straight from Renoir and Stevens portraits of women playing the piano. Manet’s naughty Nana, in her blue satin corset and ruffled bloomers, with her top-hatted gentleman friend awaiting, (on exceptional loan from Hamburg’s Kunsthalle), and Henri Gervex’s Rolla, with its scandalous nude whose clothes litter the floor, provide the occasion for a display of corsetry and silk stockings. And the grand finale is an imaginary garden, with artificial grass underfoot and birdsong on the soundtrack, surrounding Monet’s Women in the Garden, Renoir’s sun-dappled The Swing, Bazille’s Family Reunion and other works en plein air.

Through Jan 20 at the Musée d’Orsay (1 rue de la Légion d;Honneur, Paris 7th, Métro: Solférino), then moving to the Met in New York Feb 19–May 27, and the Chicago Art Institute June 29–Sept 22. www.musee-orsay.fr