Short girls: Shopping in Paris

This mannequin is about five feet tall. Evening dress worn by Mrs. Ernest Fenollosa, wife of the director of the Imperial Museum in Tokyo, circa 1886-1887.

I went to the preview of the Shopping in Paris exhibition at the Perelman this morning, and I kind of wanted to sneak back in after hours and make off with some of the dresses. Sadly, I cannot show you which ones; I thought the press kit had pictures of all the dresses so I didn’t take pictures, but none of the ones I wanted to steal are on the CD (if you end up going and happen to want to steal anything for me, I want the green dolman opera cloak by House of Worth and the peach and silver flapper dress by Yteb).

In addition to the sweet French couture from the late 1800s to the 1920s, I was really entertained by the mannequins.

When you enter the exhibit, the first thing you see is a Gaultier dress from 1995; being recent, it is of course on a mannequin that’s six feet tall, like a contemporary model. But in the rest of the exhibit, a noticeable amount of the dresses were made for women who were 5′1″ or 5′2″, like myself.

Awesome! After a lifetime of drooling over couture in magazines that would look terrible on a gnome-sized young lady like myself even if I could afford to drop ten grand on a dress, it was really interesting to see something designed for someone my height.

I asked the guide about the reason for exhibiting so many dresses made for very short women; were people just that much shorter back in the day? Were short women more fashionable? Should I have been born in 1890?

Sadly, the answer was (and I’m paraphrasing, here) “Well, back in the day, if a dress was for a normal-sized person, it would be passed along to other normal-sized women until it was completely worn out. Usually the dresses that make it into fashion exhibitions make it there because the original owner was so freakish in measurements that nobody else could wear things made for her.”

Oh well.

The exhibit opens tomorrow and runs through October 25; I highly recommend stopping by and checking it out while it’s here. More information on the museum’s website.