Au fil de l'or : L'art de se vêtir de l'Orient au Soleil-Levant

Exhibition at the musée du quai Branly, Paris, 11 February - 6 July 2025

The most precious and noble metal in the world, an object of covetousness, a symbol of wealth and splendour, a sign of elegance and refinement... Discovered almost 7,000 years ago, gold has never ceased to fascinate mankind. A material par excellence for all kinds of skills, experiments and traditions, it has been used since Antiquity to make jewellery, ornaments and weapons. As early as the fifth millennium BC, it was used to embellish the first luxury fabrics for men of power. Over the centuries that followed, skilled weavers and craftsmen from Rome, Byzantium, China, Persia and later Muslims deployed the most ingenious techniques to create truly artistic fabrics in which silk or linen fibres intertwined with gold threads and blades.

From the earliest ornaments sewn onto the clothes of the dead to the flamboyant dresses of contemporary Chinese artist Guo Pei that punctuate the entire exhibition, from the gold-woven silks of the Indian and Indonesian worlds to the glittering kimonos of the Edo period, this exhibition catalogue traces the thousand-year history of gold in the textile arts. In a dialogue combining scientific discovery and artistic perspective, it reveals the dazzling beauty, diversity, technicality and richness of costumes from a vast region stretching from the Maghreb to Japan, via the countries of the Middle East, India and China.