‘Golden Threads’ at Musée du quai Branly
The art of dressing from Northern Africa to the Far East
Exhibition view of Golden Threads: The Art of Dressing from Northern Africa to the Far East. Image courtesy of Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. Photo by Léo Delafontaine.
The exhibition Au fil de l’or: L'art de se vêtir de l'Orient au Soleil-Levant or Golden Threads: The Art of Dressing from Northern Africa to the Far East is on view this spring at Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac in Paris. It combines fashion, textile historical and traditional know-how, and technical inventions by retracing the history of gold in textiles and dress spanning millennia across cultures and civilisations. The exhibition also invites Chinese fashion designer Guo Pei to showcase her finest and most extravagant couture dresses incorporating gold in dialogue with historical museum pieces.
Exhibition view of Golden Threads: The Art of Dressing from Northern Africa to the Far East. Image courtesy of Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. Photo by Thibaut Chapotot.
This exhibition underscores how men have been fascinated with gold for thousands of years. They were on a quest to conquer gold and wear it on their bodies, first as jewelry and ornaments and then directly integrated into textiles. This precious material connotes ideas of sacredness, power, and wealth. Through its shiny qualities and color reminiscent of the sun, men have been deeply drawn to gold from the moment they found nuggets shining in rivers and soils.
This exhibition opens with an introductory section in two parts, one sharing archeological and historical examples telling the story of the development of gold extraction and early uses in textiles, and one that focuses on the technical and artisanal developments through time to turn gold into sheets of foil, gold powder glued on surfaces and then into metallic threads. Gold is an exogenous material. Billions of years ago, supernova stars in space exploded in gold dust that fell into the Earth’s crust to re-emerge through tectonic activity in rivers and soils, which is explained by astrophysicist Jérôme Margueron in a video in the exhibition.
Exhibition view of Golden Threads: The Art of Dressing from Northern Africa to the Far East. Image courtesy of Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. Photo by Léo Delafontaine.
From there onward, mankind started to mine gold and found ways to exploit its ductile and malleable properties to make thin wires and sheets. This exhibition focuses on the moment when goldsmiths and artisans begin to integrate gold directly onto clothes in the form of sewn-in small brackets, gold foil, and eventually gilt threads. This thread used for weaving and embroidery comprises two elements: a core thread of silk or wool and small strips of gilded material wound around it. Eventually, metal strips were replaced with other materials, such as animal guts, leather, and even paper covered with thin gold leaves, to use as little precious gold as possible. These technological breakthroughs have changed the face of gilded fashion across the world.
The exhibition then embarks visitors into a travelogue from Northern Africa, Europe, and the Mediterranean to the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, thus retelling a global history of cultural exchanges and trade and focusing in particular in women’s dress. A selection of haute couture ensembles from Guo closes each section. Guo’s highly embellished work carries a strong vision of gold, fashion, and high craftsmanship, especially drawing inspiration from the Qing Dynasty that pushed the art of embroidery to new heights. The designer incorporates symbolic motifs, such as peonies, the flower of wealth and honor in Chinese culture, and phoenixes which symbolize imperial power and good fortune. Guo’s magnificent gowns offer shimmering statements on the material power of gold when it is worn. They also embody the experience of wealth and status that pertained to the wearing of gold across millennia, as a wearable art form reserved for kings and queens, the richest merchants, and more generally, the elite.
The section devoted to Southeast Asia presents 19th and 20th-century pieces from Indonesia, Cambodia, and Laos stemming from the Musée du quai Branly’s collections, all exemplifying the ceremonial use of gilded textiles and clothes. In this region, drapery was the main method of dress, turning uncut lengths of woven and embroidered textiles into tube skirts, wrapped trousers, shoulder cloths, and head wraps. These textiles act as gilded surfaces activated in movement, thus wrapping the body with shimmering effects to communicate the wearers’ identities, ranks, and social customs.
The introduction of gold and silver gilt threads resulted from an intense intra-Asian trade that developed well before the arrival of Portuguese explorers and other European travelers at the end of the 15th century. China and India established themselves as the main gilt thread producers and dominated the Asian market. These materials were traded for domestic resources, particularly spices. As early as the 9th century BC, Arab and Gujarati merchants brought and exchanged precious textile products, including silks woven in the supplementary weft-thread technique. In turn, weavers from the Sumatran peninsula, through the Straits of Malacca and the northern Javanese coast, started to develop their designs and mastered silk textiles brocaded with gold threads called songket.
In Indonesia, wearing gold was the privilege of the nobility in traditional societies such as the Orang Melayu, Minangkabau, and Batak settled in Sumatra, Borneo, and Java. In the archipelago, textiles are the most precious goods imbued with sacred meanings. Integrating gilt threads through weaving and embroidery, as well as printing them with gold foil, exponentially increased their value.
Cambodian sampot. Image courtesy of Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. Photo by Pauline Guyon.
Until the mid-20th century, in both Laos and Cambodia, only the royalty could wear gold. In the court of Luang Prabang, gold thread embroidery was a court tradition practiced among women of the nobility until the fall of the monarchy in 1975. In Cambodia, the royal family wore lengths of silk patterned with gold threads or sampot sarabap meas for religious, ritual, and state-related ceremonies. Dancers of the Cambodian Royal Ballet who lived in the confines of the royal palace were allowed to wear similar attire to perform. They danced for the King in gilded pleated skirts, colorfully wrapped trousers, and sequined jackets to portray princes, princesses, and deities, directly connecting the spiritual and the regal. To this date, dancers continue to perform in these precious ensembles. One exception to this rule of exclusivity in Cambodia is wedding ceremonies. Over three days of festivities and rituals, the bride and the groom summon a royal heritage and replay the union of Preah Thong and Princess Nāgi, two mythical characters of an ancient dynasty. The groom wears an embroidered jacket and silk-wrapped trousers with gilded accents. The bride wears a pleated wrapped skirt in brocaded silk and an asymmetrical bustier entirely covered with embroidered sequins over one of her shoulders.
The real democratisation of gilded materials only happened in the 20th century, with the development of the synthetic film fiber made of foil-coated plastic commonly known Lurex®, invented in the mid-1940s. Its name comes from “lure”, which means attractiveness or temptation. Cheap lustrous threads quickly flooded markets all over the globe, even reaching India, a leading manufacturer of gilt threads, and putting local industries in jeopardy. This shift in sourcing and production came to the detriment of high craftsmanship and illustrates how, more than gold itself, in this pursuit of infinite shine, the gilded effect matters most.
Golden Threads: The Art of Dressing from Northern Africa to the Far East. Image courtesy of Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac.
Au fil de l’or: L'art de se vêtir de l'Orient au Soleil-Levant or Golden Threads: The Art of Dressing from Northern Africa to the Far East is on view at Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, from 11 February to 6 July 2025. More information here.
About the writer
Magali An Berthon is a textile and fashion historian focusing on 19th to 20th century and contemporary Southeast Asian textiles and dress, particularly in Cambodia. She is Assistant Professor at the American University of Paris and the co-curator of the exhibition Au fil de l’or (Golden Threads).