The Colour of Clothes: selling French couture around the world at the ‘Salon du Goût Français’ virtual exhibition 1921-3

This paper will examine the use of the Lumière brothers’ groundbreaking invention, the Autochrome process, in a government-backed exhibition of French luxury commodities, the Salon du Goût Français. The exhibition showed in Paris in 1921, 1922 and 1923 and also underwent two international tours during this time, first to North America and then, on board two decommissioned battleships, to Australasia, China, Vietnam, Japan and India. The exhibition publicity and catalogues drew heavily on the language of the art world to validate what was essentially a commercial enterprise in which all the goods were available to order from the most prestigious manufacturers in France: but the commodities were exhibited (in two dimensions) on backlit Autochrome plates, mounted and arranged as if they were paintings in an art gallery. Out of over 2,000 Autochromes now in the archive of the Museè des Sciences et Métiers, Paris, showing a huge range of goods from motor cars to perfume bottles, the majority was of fashionable dress, much of it from major couture houses, plus ready to wear, lingerie, menswear, children’s wear and accessories including jewellery – all in full colour.

This innovative method of advertising and selling the finest examples of French culture and taste enabled thousands of bulky artefacts to be easily and economically transported ‘virtually’ in a trunk to North America and as a form of soft power, on a civilizing mission (thinly disguised as a diplomatic venture) to French colonies and allies in the Far East to boost the economy and restore France’s imperial and cultural hegemony as global arbiter of taste after the trauma of the First World War.

The Salon du Goût Français appropriated new technology to sell fashion, not dissimilar to today’s digital platforms, technology that provided the best representation of the colour of clothes in any medium available at the time, both then for its viewers and for today’s fashion historians.