Muse, museum, mode.
We sing much about museums but not enough about the muses.
Is it because we rarely meet them?
But when we do...
See them, there, beyond the rows of columns where light and shadow play, appearing and disappearing behind the chiselled curve of the stone, dressed in tweed and silk, where the jewels, the flowers - and the jewels that are flowers - blossom.
See them come forward, these sublime inspirers, their waists cinched in velvets encrusted with pearls, or liberated beneath the pleats, walking like statues that have come alive among those that are not - allegories of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - in this palace that awakens beneath the lights of beauty, rhythm and allure.

Fashion muses that enchant a museum: Galliera!
A magical name, with the scent of a legend. The name of a blue-eyed duchess born in Genoa, who sought to give her collection of masterpieces a worthy showcase in the City of Light. Flemish, Spanish and Italian paintings, 18th century French furniture, Sèvres porcelain, precious clocks where time would stand still, as in this peristyle with its cloister-like appearance, where the columns reach towards the sky, winding around themselves.
A captivating palace, that would unite the marble dreams of Andrea Palladio and the visionary ironwork of Gustave Eiffel, the staircases and the gardens, and would be both Italian and French, Renaissance and Belle Époque, otherworldly yet eruditely structured.
A dream museum, today restored to its former splendour thanks to the House of CHANEL and which is now home, under its red brick and cut stone vaults, to the most astounding treasures in the history of fashion, from the 18th century to the present day.

Day dresses and evening gowns, casaquins and court attire, hats and gloves, and even Marie-Antoinette's bodice recommended by Rose Bertin, “Minister of Fashion”... Blue silk taffeta, green satin, gilded silver lace, graceful cuts, victorious over time. If clothes have their history, history has its clothes, exhibited in the “Gabrielle Chanel Galleries” by a patronage devoted to art, taste and style, making Galliera the first permanent exhibition dedicated to the history of fashion in Paris.

Proof, if proof was needed, that fashion is always at home in Paris, and that it continues to triumph today thanks to the lively gait of these Haute Couture muses, there, behind the columns where the light plays.