An Elegant Legacy Comes Alive

By JAY COCKS

The train stops in the stillness of time. Passengers in this single car of the Orient Express luxuriate forever in a reverie of richness. The burnished wood of the dining car, the deep upholstery of the seats, the soft, shaded lighting make the figures stand out in relief, their clothing a testament to social identity and design legacy. In this ravishing tableau, the train is merely the transportation, the setting. It is the clothing that offers a round-trip, first-class ticket for a giddy voyage into the past.

The standard of style in this dining car is punishingly high. Just inside the entrance, the incarnadine exclamation of a Poiret dress laps a female figure like ripples on a lakeshore. Next to it, a dress from the House of Cybes, all shifting shades of blue with cascades of twinkling pearls, looks as if the stars had begun to shine in the afternoon sky. The roseate elegance of another dress showered with embroidered petals could seem, to the mannequin at the door, either an invitation or a challenge. To anyone looking in from outside, the dress draws the eye instantly and infuses the whole scene with its own tones of luxuriant nostalgia, the lasting afterglow of a perpetual sunset.

It is the intention of the new Museum of Fashion Arts, inaugurated this week in Paris by French President Francois Mitterrand, to make sure that the sun always shines brightly on the world of fashion. Tableaux like the Orient Express--part of the museum's premier exhibition, "Moments of Fashion," a display of costumes spanning the past three centuries--may have a sentimental cast, but they also have a dramatic vibrancy. The new museum, which is contiguous to the Union of Decorative Arts and part of the Louvre, thus becomes one of the world's foremost facilities for the study of clothing.

The exhibit, which shows off some 112 costumes on three separate floors, is the museum's way of introducing itself. It will be succeeded in the spring by a show of Yves Saint Laurent, then of Christian Dior. There will be space on the fifth floor for permanent exhibition of items from the museum's collection of more than 10,000 costumes, a few of which date back as far as the 16th century. And there will be a boutique to sell reworkings of famous designer accessories, as well as space to restore clothes. In all, the museum will occupy eleven floors; with the new Fashion Institute nearby, students will have immediate access to 300 years of the past. In scope, the new museum is one of the world's most commanding fashion facilities. Its size and location confer upon it a legitimacy that is automatic and virtually unrivaled. As part of the Louvre, the museum officially makes fashion design a part of the great creative tapestry of the fine arts, taking it further from the world of craft. "Fashion deserved to be installed in the heart of the city, enclosed within the walls of the greatest museum in the world," said Minister of Culture Jack Lang when he announced the establishment of the museum almost four years ago.

Contemporary designers clearly welcome the museum as a reaffirmation of their traditions and the ongoing importance of their work. "I think it's a very good idea to put fashion in a museum, and the Louvre in particular," says Hubert de Givenchy. "It should have been done a long time ago." Adds Azzedine Alaia, the most inventive of Paris' younger generation of designers: "It's all fantastic. I hope to be exhibited there. We all do!"

The museum was built in the Louvre's Pavillon de Marsan, which was first finished in 1666, burned during the Paris Commune of 1871 and left largely unoccupied since its restoration was completed in 1905. When Decorator Jacques Grange first inspected the premises in 1982, he found himself inside a glorious attic in which hundreds of pigeons flew free under a glass rooftop supported by a metal framework. Grange and Architect Daniel Kahane kept practically everything but the birds. They added oak for the floors, stone for stairs and gallery walls, spending nearly $6 million to achieve an easy, inviting elegance. It is an ambiance that contains the clothes nicely without competing with them.

"The setting is sublime," says Yvonne Deslandres, 63, who spent the past 25 years collecting some 9,000 costumes that form the core of the museum's permanent collection. It is also highly symbolic: the windows, worked neatly into the exhibition space by Kahane, overlook a splendid Parisian landscape where fashion still thrives as it does no place else in the world. Just a short distance away are the couture houses of Saint Laurent, Madame Gres, Givenchy and Dior, which began their spring/summer showings even as Mitterrand was presiding over the museum's official opening. In March, the courtyard of the Louvre will be overrun by the world fashion press and buyers assembled to check out over 50 different ready-to-wear shows. At the Museum of Fashion Arts, tradition not only continues, it abounds and surrounds. "Moments of Fashion" sets high standards for working designers and future fashion exhibits. It is smartly curated and mounted with the kind of refinement that leaves room for a witty little coup like showing two pair of knee breeches on busily pedaling half-mannequins. On the top floor, some 18th century costumes move in almost antic procession on mannequins molded like silhouettes in some three-dimensional shadow play. Below, on the 19th century floor, a woman dresses for the opera in a ravishing gown by Charles Frederick Worth; across the gallery, an array of simple cottons and linens arranged as if for a Sunday outing at a park creates an effortless paradigm of everyday elegance.

It is the 20th century, however, that rates the greatest exhibition space and is likely to grab the most attention. Besides the Orient Express tableau, created from an actual car that was once part of the fabled train, there is an arrangement of hats displayed in glass cases and perched on tree branches as if the silken, veiled and feathered extravagances were so many nesting birds. A full-figured mannequin lounges unclothed in erotic exhaustion on a rumpled bed, her lingerie strewn on the floor all around her. A whole range of vintage Schiaparellis is displayed nearby in a kind of scaled-down circus ring, the perfect setting for giddy fantasies of appliqued jungle beasts and performing animals.

"That Italian artist who makes dresses," was Chanel's dismissive description of her contemporary and competitor. Indeed, the spirit of Schiaparelli seems a little strained beside the array of Chanel evening wear dating from the '30s that is displayed just across the floor with a fastidious simplicity the designer herself would surely have approved. Five Chanel dresses, all black, face five gowns, all white, by Madeleine Vionnet, setting up mirror images of surreptitious splendor. The impression is instantly contemporary. The impact suggests that the best design trounces time and needs only the auspices of a fine museum to keep reasserting its strength and relevance. At last, in Paris, world fashion has a single, grand place to get a grip on its future, because it will be so easy now to keep an eye on the past.

With reporting by Dorie Denbigh/Paris