A Country’s Silent Envoy: The Dress
Centuries ago, envoys travelled from court to court between France and Siam. Centuries later, another envoy set out. It was silent, yet it carried the memory of an entire country: the dress.
The story of the exhibition begins long before fashion. The first contacts between Siam and France were made in the 17th century, through the diplomatic missions that travelled back and forth between the court of King Narai of Ayutthaya and the Versailles of Louis XIV. Begun between the two courts in 1685 and 1686, this relationship took on a new dimension in 1856 with the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation, signed under King Mongkut. Where letters, gifts and envoys had once passed between palaces, centuries later something else would carry on the dialogue between the two countries: the dress.
In the early 1960s, as she prepared for the visits to Europe and America she would make with King Rama IX, Queen Sirikit turned to her own country’s past. Historic Thai court dress was researched; old silhouettes, weaves and ways of dressing were studied anew. From this research were born eight formal styles of Thai dress for women: the Chud Thai Phra Rajaniyom. Yet Sirikit did not wish to summon the past as it was. She wanted to carry it into the present. Perhaps this is where the most beautiful aspect of the exhibition begins: tradition is not locked away in a museum case; it is placed once again on a body. Thai silks, brocades, gold and silver threads, fabrics wrapped around the body and the ceremonial codes of the court are preserved, but they now move with the stride of a modern woman.
Then Paris enters the story. Through the silks, the gold threads and the centuries-old traditions of the court, the door of a couture salon opens. The year is 1959. Queen Sirikit’s path crosses that of Pierre Balmain. The memory of Bangkok meets the scissors of Paris. As the Thai textiles Sirikit brought with her took shape through Balmain’s couture expertise, François Lesage’s embroideries settled on the fabrics like light. On one side, silks woven for centuries; on the other, the construction of Parisian haute couture. On one side, Bangkok; on the other, Paris. And between the two, the body of a queen.
The relationship between Sirikit and Balmain soon went beyond an exchange between a queen and a couturier. Over the years, Balmain was so taken by this world that he named designs “Bangkok” and “Sirikit”. For the gowns made for the Queen’s official visits, the country to be visited, the culture to be encountered and the nature of the ceremony were all taken into account. The wardrobe thus ceased to be a realm of personal taste. It became a form of representation, even a silent diplomacy. Walking through the exhibition’s galleries, the words Balmain spoke in 1964 take on new meaning: “A queen’s wardrobe enters her country’s history along with her.”
As you walk through the exhibition, you see how this history was recorded in fabric. The brocades of Thai court culture catch the light with their gold and silver threads. In these fabrics, once reserved for the royal family and the high nobility, pattern is not mere ornament; it is also a sign of rank, status and ceremony. When pha nung skirts, chong kraben forms, and khit, chok and phrae wa weaves are placed side by side, you feel you are looking less at a wardrobe than at a country’s visual alphabet. Each fabric comes from a different region, each pattern from a different memory.
Among these fabrics, the one that stops me most is mat mii: an ikat woven for generations by women in the villages of north-eastern Thailand. The threads are dyed before they ever reach the loom; the pattern emerges only as the weaving progresses. It is as if the fabric slowly remembers its own memory. The SUPPORT Foundation, established by Queen Sirikit to preserve traditional crafts and support rural producers, played an important role in carrying these weaves into the world of the court and, later, of international fashion. And so an invisible thread is drawn taut between the palace in Bangkok and a loom in a distant village.
A dress from 1985 that I came across in the exhibition makes this invisible thread almost tangible. Designed by Erik Mortensen, who worked at the house after Pierre Balmain’s death, it combines Thai mat mii silk with velvet. Its rhinestones, gold threads, beads and sequins were embroidered in the Paris ateliers of Maison Lesage. As I draw closer to the dress, I do not see a single design. I see three different hands: the hand of the Thai weaver, the hand of the Parisian couturier, the hand of the Lesage embroiderer. Working thousands of kilometres apart, these hands finally meet on the same body.
Perhaps this is the real message “La Mode en Majesté” holds for me. When a culture is carried elsewhere, it is not necessarily lost. Sometimes, when another hand touches it, it takes on a new form. What Sirikit did was not to dissolve her own tradition into the West, but to make it speak again in another language. Balmain’s lines do not erase the memory of Thai silk. Lesage’s embroideries do not cover it over. On the contrary, when all these layers come together, a new image emerges.
The story does not end with Balmain’s death. Sirikit continued to work with Erik Mortensen; later, through relationships with houses such as Dior and Valentino, Thai textiles lived on in the world of couture. As I reach the final sections of the exhibition, the past slowly merges with the present. In the gowns of contemporary Thai designers, there are no longer literal repetitions of historic court dress. Silhouettes have changed, the body has been freed, construction has become contemporary. But Thai silk is still there. The way the fabric wraps around the body is still there. The memory of the eight royal styles of dress is still there. The silhouette has changed; the memory has remained.
Today, the story Sirikit began continues in the hands of other generations. While Queen Suthida carries on the work of preserving traditional crafts, Sirikit’s granddaughter, Princess Sirivannavari, as a fashion designer, supports young Thai creatives and rethinks the place of traditional textiles within contemporary fashion. And so an invisible line appears between the 17th century at the start of the exhibition and the contemporary runway at its end: a line running from the Siamese envoys who travelled to Versailles to the palace in Bangkok, from a loom in north-eastern Thailand to Balmain’s Paris salons, from Lesage’s embroidery tables to the Thai designers of today.
As I leave the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, what stays with me most is not the splendour of the gowns, but their silence. For none of them needs to speak. A fabric already tells where it came from, an embroidery whose hands it passed through, a silhouette which past it carries. A country’s modernisation does not always mean taking off its past and putting on another dress. Sometimes it means looking at its own fabric again, cutting it anew, draping it anew, and stepping out into the world wearing it.