Dresses are blooming in town

Romantic and bucolic, so fine, so fresh, so delicate: the vegetal motif makes gravitate around it a whole constellation of ideas, qualities and virtues which are attached to it like an escort and which spontaneously come to mind. For reasons that often escape us, the indivisible whole thus formed seems to the observer as natural as the sky of a summer night filled with stars and mystery. Fortunately, there are people who question this state of affairs.

“Relating to nature as a support for emotional projection has now become a commonplace: to look at nature is to be sent back to our personal history, our memories, our affective state”, argues art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual in her essay learn to see, published last summer (Actes Sud). “The countryside is beautiful in autumn for its melancholy, the mountains are sublime as they remind us of our fragile human condition”, she continues.

Deeply rooted, our link to the vegetal and especially floral motif takes us back to the Rococo period.

In an attempt to renew our gaze in the face of what we have frozen, she addresses this warning: ” This regime of readability paradoxically contributes to making the living world unreadable; it contributes to making it impossible to appreciate for its own wealth of meanings embodied in sensible forms. During an investigation as lush as it is passionate, she struggles to extract her gaze from the classifications from which it has taken the fold, observing the ornament and the decoration as a subject, the bee and the flower in a painting by Heade “like actors in a relationship being played out”.

Cattleya orchid and three Brazilian hummingbirds (1871), by Martin Johnson Heade

Deeply rooted, our link to the vegetal and especially floral motif takes us back to the Rococo period. Already present in the XVIIIand century, in the middle of lace, on the French dresses which made the reputation of our country throughout the world, it will shape the grammar of Christian Dior as does the glory of Yves Saint Laurent, period peasant chic, and more widely to find its place in the hippie challenge, before inviting itself on the grunge negligees.

A colorful and expressive decorative element, reflecting a skin-deep sensitivity (Laura Ashley version or Little House on the Prairie) and same series red wire Magnum, this pattern suffers from having been potted for its beauty and the mirror that we saw there. This reading grid has lived too long, but we certainly must not destroy it! Only redouble our attention to better look at the living, human as well as non-human. Give him this flower.

Flared dress in cotton voile, Comptoir des Cotonniers, €123.
Cotton midi dress, Zimmermann, €795.
Amélie short dress, in silk chiffon, Isabel Marant, €990.
Printed viscose dress with puffed sleeves, Mango, €69.99.
  Pussy-bow dress in dandelion silk georgette, Celine by Hedi Slimane, €2,290.

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