Enfnts Terribles

A collection show that actually shows the collection

This isn’t your usual museum spectacle packed with blockbuster loans. The show relies almost entirely on the museum’s own archive, with just a handful of pieces brought in from elsewhere. Why? To cut back on institutional overproduction and show what’s already in the vaults. Consider it slow-fashion curation, with just as much drama and a lot more depth.

Here’s where it gets juicy: Rococo, as we know it, wasn’t even a fashion period. It was an art movement (roughly 1730 to 1760) full of pastels, curls, and ornamentation. Fashion only caught on later. What the exhibition does is unpack that mess, stitch by stitch, myth by myth. The museum calls their latest exhibition a patchwork of styles spanning 80 years.

The anatomy of a dress

One of the show’s most compelling moments is a full deconstruction of an 18th-century dress. Every layer, every hidden hook, every undergarment is revealed—and suddenly, one “outfit” becomes 13 different pieces of complex engineering. The takeaway? Underwear was everything. Literally. It protected your outerwear (often silk, expensive, and not washable), kept your sweat in check, and signaled cleanliness in France in the era’s weird hygiene logic. You could smell awful – but as long as your white underclothes were pristine, you were “clean”.

Fashion with footnotes

The show doesn’t stop at historical fashion. A piece by Raf Simons appears; a men’s coat made from Duchesse silk, traditionally used only in women’s haute couture. It’s a modern echo of what the exhibition argues all along: fashion’s boundaries have always been blurrier than we pretend.

Speaking of blurred lines, men get a lot of love here too. Not just as wearers of fashion, but as fashion obsessives. The “Macaronis”, flamboyant 18th-century men who dressed with maximalist flair, are given space to strut posthumously, reminding us that style isn’t and never was gendered.