Costume Balls

The McCord Stewart Museum is producing Costume Balls : Dressing Up History, 1870-1927, an exhibition that will be on view in 2024-25. Its design, entrusted to Paprika, is the subject of an infinitely meticulous and exhaustive curatorial vision, featuring outfits worn on these occasions from the McCord Stewart Museum’s renowned Costume, Fashion and Textiles collection. The choice of JJannon typography from the Optimo foundry was an obvious one, evoking the typographic excellence of seventeenth-century France. The book serves as a frame for the images, presenting them in their full scale. The compositions make use of the neutrality of white, which brings an elegance and codes specific to haute couture and history books.