Shades of Elegance – Fashion and Fabrics in Teheran Around 1900 / Museum Rietberg

When the St Gallen merchant Emil Alpiger returned to Zurich in 1896 after more than twenty years in Persia, his luggage included a wooden trunk full of Persian garments and fabrics. The family safeguarded this treasure trove for generations. Now, more than a hundred years later, the precious clothes, fabrics, wall hangings, and embroideries are focus of the exhibition “Shades of Elegance – Fashion and Fabrics in Teheran Around 1900” at Museum Rietberg in Zürich, Switzerland.

The textiles stand for the taste and love of colour of a foregone time and culture, but also bear evidence to a vibrant age of trading. They are the product of reciprocal cultural exchange: cultural hybrids that join East and West. Thus, for instance, Iranian weavers and tailors found inspiration in European fashion and Western motifs and went on to make them their own. The exhibition indicates the power that lies in creative exchange and takes viewers back to nineteenth-century Persia with all its vivid and colourful works of art, to an era we otherwise only know from old black-and-white photographs.

Shades of Elegance – Fashion and Fabrics in Teheran Around 1900 at Museum Rietberg in Zürich. Exhibition walkthrough and interview with the curator of the exhibition, Axel Langer (in German language, english subtitles). Zürich, Switzerland, November 27, 2018.

More videos on contemporary art, design, our Artists, Designers, TV pioneer Vernissage TV provides you with an authentic insight into the world of contemporary fine arts, design and architecture. With its two main series "No Comment" and "Interviews", art tv channel VernissageTV attends opening receptions of exhibitions worldwide, interviews artists, designers, architects. VTV provides art lovers with news, reports and features from the international art scene. VernissageTV: the window to the art world. Das Fenster zur Kunstwelt. La fenêtre sur le monde de l'art. A janela para o mundo da arte. La ventana al mundo del arte. نافذة على عالم الفن. 到艺术世界的窗口。Окно в мир искусства. Since 2005.