Weekly Cultural Outing: Royal Fashion at Casa Franca-Brasil

Though this week is the beginning of the Fashion Olympics in Rio, starting with the release of the Sex and the City movie on Friday and the Fashion Rio show next week. But Casa Franca-Brasil just opened their own fashion bonanza.

This week, I went to this free museum right next to the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil. It's housed in this stunningly beautiful building, what used to be the Customs House of Rio. The exhibit is called Mulheres Reais: Modas e Modos no Rio do Dom Joao VI (Royal Women: Fashion and Ways of Life in Dom Joao VI's Rio.

Ladies and gentleman: go see this exhibit! You can't take pictures but this guy apparently snuck some in, so check them out here. He also took some of the Nippon exhibit I talked about last week.

So, the exhibit. You walk into what seems like a palace, and there's opera and classical music playing, which makes you feel like you somehow went back in time. Later, for about five minutes, a great little samba drumming song came on, which seemed so out of place with the opera. But it seemed appropriate, the kind of culture shock the royals must have felt when they came to Brazil.

The background: in 1808, the Portuguese Royal Family and its court, which encompassed 10,000 people, disembarked in Rio de Janeiro after running away from the threat of Napolean. When they arrived, there were only 50,000 people living here, two thirds of which were slaves.

First, they have a series of modernized recreations of the royal women's dresses. My favorite was a Spanish inspired one, that is a series of red fans somehow strung together into a dress. Then there were a series of "realistic" recreations based on paintings, ranging from those crazy hoop skirt things to long velvet gowns. I especially loved their hair ornaments. Next, they had actual clothes dating back to the 1750s, which were either children's clothes or for really short women. Sadly, these were the least impressive, and were mostly white undergarment-like things.

Next, they have a recreation of a typical home for the "regular" people from the early 1800s. They were built out of wood in the Arab style, an odd box-like structure so that people could see out but not in. In said recreated house, there were two actresses who scared the daylights out of me when I realized they were real: one like a "regular" citizen and the other has her slave. Frankly, I just thought it was creepy.

This is where the exhibit takes a look at the "white" women and slave women fashions. The "white" woman's fashions were apparently also inspired by the Arabs, and looked like the types of outfits women wear in modern Afghanistan, but in black. The slave fashion was quite simple, but at least the women could breathe--I have no idea how those royal women survived their first summer here in their huge gowns. Also, the halter top was a common top in slave fashion--maybe that's how it came about. Another surprising thing about the slave fashion was the huge amounts of gold jewelery they used, which they had on display. They wore huge necklaces and charms on bangle bracelets.

Then they showed how those women dressed in Arab clothes radically changed their style with the arrival of the royal court, wearing flirty little British-style dresses with ribbons and bows. Imported clothing boomed, and everyone wanted to look like the empress.

The next space was dedicated to recreations of Debret's work, a French artist who saw Rio through European eyes. This part showed how royal fashion changed fashion for lower class and slave women, making shoes the sign that a black woman was free. The last room was dedicated to modern Brazilian couture inspired by royal fashion, and at the very end there was a little tunnel about how the royals helped meld European tradition, the entrance of the kings in the city, with African tradition to make the spectacle that is Rio's carnival.

As usual, my only complaint is the signage. The guards were quite helpful here and two people told me where to go without my asking, but the explanations of the pieces are on the backs of some of the displays, while some are tiny and hard to find.