Clothing is always revealing: of a time, an individual, a group, a society... This new show examines its use and representations through about sixty works, dated from 1860 to the present.
A French term for clothing, “costume” is closely related to the French word “custom”. Since the 19th century, the definition has evolved, and clothing has been studied through the lens of various disciplines: history, ethnology, anthropology, art, fashion and sociology.
“Seeming or Being” features about sixty artworks from the museum’s collections, from the 1860s to the present. The artists use clothing and accessories to define typologies or, conversely, they reveal the uniqueness of the person through a simple shirt or disguise. At the crossroads between the individual and the collective, clothing can exist in the norm or on the margins.
The Opéra National du Rhin is participating in this show through an exceptional loan of costumes made for the opera by Leoš Janacek, The Makropulos Affair, presented in 2011 in Strasbourg.
