The director also has quite a few items made to surround the featured dresses, like a hand painted shawl, which is more vibrant than using a faded one from that period, she said. The gloves are sculpted too to relay more expressiveness. There is also an abundance of extravagant food (including some of Napoleon’s party favorites) to indicate how she is very much showing off. But it was fun trying to control the center of it,” she said.įor The Met, de Wilde dressed a dog figure in a Napoleon-era style early 19th-century French gentleman’s coat. And I don’t know if it’s possible to achieve that or if I have achieved that. “It’s very hard to make something feel alive. They are all wearing the same style but they were presented so differently because of their attitude. What was so beautiful were those white muslin dresses but not everyone was beautiful inside. “It was really fun to see how much it changes a dress. For an added effect, the backbiting female mannequins were also sculpted to have “very bitchy” faces, de Wilde said. Visitors will find speech bubbles in the scene that highlight actual gossip about Bonaparte that was chronicled in her time. Even after her husband was ordered by his brother Napoleon to return to France and that his marriage be annulled, the couple attempted to enter France together in 1804 but Elizabeth was denied permission by order of Napoleon. So I had a mannequin molded with breasts, which you rarely see in museums,” de Wilde said.īonaparte (an American socialite who married Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Jerome) was obsessed with France, so much so that she wanted to live there and be part of the royal family, which she was denied of, de Wilde said. I thought that was interesting, because people are still really hung up on breasts. One source of inspiration was Elizabeth Bonaparte, who the director noted “liked to have her breasts out, which was very much the French style…and the American interpretation of that same fashion was a lot more demure. “A lot of people forget that not everyone was just swanning around feeling beautiful in the early 19th century reciting poetry and feeling romantic. Mannequins were molded to have facial expressions, full breasts and other features that subsequently give an unexpected perspective on their attire. Taking a comedic approach, de Wilde said she took photographs of people, who she wanted to have mannequins made in the likeness of. “So I have a comical scene based on a disastrous family.…Whenever you see the darker side of life in another period, you can balance that with the beauty and the fascination with it.” That hasn’t changed much, either,” de Wilde said. There was no help, except to say they were having hysteria and label them. Some women used it to get out of a situation and some women were truly unwell. ![]() Her playful approach has researched undercurrents such as that “hysteria was once a blanket term for anything that was wrong with a woman if she wasn’t sitting calmly embroidering. To that end, one room features a woman in hysteria, a drunk man with spilled wine and a rat crawling up his leg, a cat freaking out about the rat, two people running to the rescue, two frightened children and an overturned card table. ![]() ![]() Directing “Emma,” starring Anya Taylor-Joy and set in early 19th-century England, made for a good fit.Īll in all, the focus of her rooms is to remind people that life is messy no matter what time period that it is, de Wilde said. Visitors to what is the second of a two-part exhibition about American fashion will find de Wilde’s mise-en-scènes in the Baltimore Room - a room from a Baltimore town house built around 1810 that belonged to the merchant and shipowner Henry Craig - and in the Benkard Room, a parlor room from a Petersburg, Va., house built in 1811. I exaggerate to a certain extent and then put in very human things that people forget about because I think life is totally ridiculous. “In ‘Emma,’ I said, ‘What if she got a nosebleed during the proposal?’ I get nosebleeds all the time. “There is a habit to create a stereotype of ‘this is a woman in distress and she will always look like this’ and ‘this is a man who is romantic and he will always do this and look like that,’” she said. Not afraid to magnify the absurdities and realities of life, de Wilde said she just remembers people acting crazy more than other people do. Fashion Photographer Albert Watson Pictures the Isle of Skye in a New Exhibition
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