Artisan Exhibition at The Paris Fashion Museum

I have been fascinated by the work of haute couture for much of my 30-year career in fashion, but when I began offering these Fashion Experience Tours in Paris, it was a much different fashion landscape.

The world of haute couture is a special one that, in 2015, was still mostly hidden from public view, a space for those VICs (very important clients), journalists, and the occasional influencer. Haute couture is not a product that is sold in stores, so the clients are really the audience, and most of them prefer to show off just to each other. The journey to discover the small supplier ateliers was hard enough, never mind getting them to reply to an email. There was no real information about who these people were, and they sure as heck weren't using Instagram as a promotional tool. Suffice it to say, it took a lot of perseverance and patience to first find and then build my relationships with these special artisans over the last 10 years.

Which is why I am so thrilled to see them finally getting their flowers (handmade from silk, of course) in the latest series of exhibitions at the Palais Galliera, aka the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, aka the only dedicated fashion museum in Paris. Titled Weaving, Embroidery, and Embellishing. The Crafts and Trades of Fashion, this 3-part exhibition features the work of historic and contemporary craftspeople, bringing these works of art to life. Over the next few years, the museum’s lower galleries will bring to the forefront the savoir-faire of these time-honoured artisanal skills, celebrating the incredible workmanship we see and the workers who usually stay behind the scenes. The first part of these exhibitions opened on December 13th and uses the flower as a framework for explorations of the various specialties on display. The exhibition features interactive displays that allow visitors to examine embroidered, feathered, or fabric flowers under a magnifying glass, with their materials and tools alongside explanations of how they are made.

Flower samples from the Maison Legeron

These handmade blooms were often crafted by the atelier Legeron since the early 1800s, which we visited many times to see their process. Bruno Légeron guided us through the dusty boxes and back rooms of the old building, showing how he stiffened fabrics with gelatin and used antique die cutters to shape petals from silk, leather, plastic, and other materials. He manually dyed each petal and shaped it with hot tools over tiny cushions before winding the petals onto a handmade stem. Though it sounds simple, mastering each step takes years, and many of his workers had been there for decades. Already a precarious business in the 21st century, Légeron was forced to sell off his company in 2020 due to the pandemic and the shutdown of Paris.

Flower samples from my visit to the Maison Lemarie

While the museum is celebrating ancient houses like this that might no longer exist, it is also displaying the work of newer maisons and contemporary artisans who are keeping these métiers alive. One of these is the atelier of Aurelia Leblanc, an artisan weaver we were lucky enough to visit during previous iterations of the Paris Fashion Experience. I actually wrote about her unique weaving processes for Elle Canada (read about it here), and some of her work has been acquired by the museum for this exhibition, along with other contemporary artisans, some of which we might get to visit with the group tours in 2026.

This exhibition will change twice over the next three years, which means you can see it with me during my next group tour, May 8-14th, and probably the next five trips after that, each May and October. There will also be opportunities for private visits to some of my atelier partners while I am in Paris for the entire month of May, so be sure to get in touch if you’d like to book a tour for yourself or your group. Let’s go to Paris!