Decorous and flirtatious intent
Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century
Metropolitan Museum of Art
In Jean-Francois de Bastide’s erotic novella and architectural treatise, The Little House, the elegant artifice of eighteenth-century French design becomes a tool of seduction for the Marquis de Tremicour. According to Bastide, lavish clothing and the luxurious home were meant not simply to be aesthetically pleasing, but were intended to attract, arouse, and ultimately to seduce.
The exhibition explores the dressed body’s spatial negotiation of the 18th-century interior as a choreography of seduction and erotic play. The coquettish Polonaise dress with its hem raised to reveal the ankle is juxtaposed with a side table that transforms into a dressing table through mechanisms similar to the gown’s hidden ties. The arch of the foot introduced by shoes with a Louis-style heel is seen with the scrolling legs of tables and chairs from the period shod in ormolu sabots. Lavish banyans, the “undress” of 18th-century rakes, and fans, an accessory that could be wielded with both decorous and flirtatious intent, are presented as the favored modes of beguilement of the 18th-century man about town and his femme du monde counterpart.