‘If you want to see the soul of Paris’, recommended the French newspaper Le Figaro on 10 June 1905, ‘take a stroll down the Rue de la Paix at four o’clock today. Nowhere else in the world […] will you experience so viscerally the heady sensation of luxury, of sumptuous elegance, of the superfluous, at once fragile and triumphant.’

It was at 7 Rue de la Paix that Charles Frederick Worth (1825-95) – the pioneering Englishman who was the originator of Parisian haute couture, both as an industry and as a dream factory – opened his fashion house. While it is impossible to travel back to 1905, Paris’ Petit Palais has staged in its grand galleries an exhibition about the House of Worth. It conjures up a historical panorama ranging from the Second Empire to the Roaring Twenties. More than 400 works are featured, including clothing, accessories, art objects, paintings, illustrations and photographs, and some rare items are on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Palazzo Pitti, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and many private collections.

This is the first exhibition devoted to the House of Worth. Why is it important? Firstly because, while high fashion is often assumed to have its roots in French culture, this show tells the unusual story of an English interloper whose name became a byword for Parisian luxury and refinement, a fact that attracted comments throughout his career and even found its way into his obituary in The Times. Worth’s French was never fluent – part of the reason why he loved his wealthy American clients – and he remained all his life stoutly English. An article published in the Bradford Observer in April 1874 paints this picture: ‘In person Mr Worth is of medium English height […] He has black eyes, hair and moustache dark, and a fully developed forehead, which a phrenologist would doubtless say is crammed with form, perception, colour, taste… He is not a bit “Frenchy”. He retains much of the bluntness which characterises the English and has “taken on” very little of the suavity […] of the French.’

Suavity aside, Worth did, in common with Yves Saint-Laurent, who made fashion paper dolls as a child, appear to have experienced couture as a calling. Born in Lincolnshire, he moved to Paris in 1846 as young man and started work as a sales clerk for Maison Gagelin, a prestigious textile merchant that sold silk fabrics to the French court. In 1858 he formed a partnership with the Swede Otto Gustav Bobergh to create Worth & Bobergh at 7 Rue de la Paix, in the epicentre of the fashion world, where Paquin, Doucet and Doeillet also traded. In 1870, Worth ended his collaboration with Bobergh and his creations were from then on labelled ‘Worth’, with a woven version of his signature – the first brand logo – a powerful symbol of the reputation of a Parisian house so prestigious that it no longer needed to indicate its address. Worth would also introduce the notion of seasonal collections and fashion shows on live models, staged in his enfilade de salons.

What do the dresses on show tell us? The chronological design of the exhibition is subtly dynamic, with each space presenting the fashion house’s creations from a different angle, encouraging visitors to understand Worth in the round. In the first section, the clothes are presented facing the visitors. The next section, entitled ‘24 Hours in the Life of a Woman’, in a nod to Stefan Zweig’s tale, is panoptic in shape to enable visitors to see an entire day’s wardrobe at a single glance. The third section exhibits the creations laterally, on a central platform, opposite paintings of the same era hanging on the walls. As we move into the 20th century, the pieces are positioned along the walls to illustrate the evolution of the Worth style. The arc of the entire show leads from 19th-century crinolines and bustles – their richly braided and ornamented velvets and brocades at times evocative of style tapissier (upholstery style), which gave their wearers the appearance of walking and talking pieces of furniture – to the spare, shimmering, fluid silhouettes of the Jazz Age, telling the familiar story of the freeing of the female body.

Another striking aspect of the show is its variety. There is a wide range of highly distinctive items on display, from the very grand – a wondrous 1900 court dress with a train, embroidered all over with silver and gold, made for Lady Curzon – to the whimsical – an umbrella costume of jumpsuit and hat made of green canvas, pink silk taffeta and ivory Bakelite in 1925 for a Bright Young Thing to wear at a fancy dress ball. Worth’s clientele was varied: while his house had its beginnings at the court of Empress Eugénie, where Princess Pauline of Metternich, the wife of the Austrian ambassador, was one of Worth’s early patrons, he and his descendants dressed other royals – though never Queen Victoria, who did not approve of French fashions – and aristocrats, as well as the haute bourgeoisie, the wives of successful financiers and industrialists, and the art world, cultivating particularly close ties to the theatre. Sarah Bernhardt, Lillie Langtry and Jenny Lind all wore Worth.

Beyond social history, what makes a great fashion exhibition is an occasional – and admittedly spooky – fairytale ability almost to animate the clothes. This I witnessed at the V&A’s Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams show in 2019 where I was surrounded throughout by a crowd of sighing women, all in the throes of sartorial enchantment. Charles Worth: Inventing Haute Couture does in its own way pull a similar trick, evoking the presence of the women inside the dresses on display by creating a sort of Proustian fever dream.

This is most effective in the early stages of the exhibition, which chart France’s return to prosperity and the gradual establishment of the Third Republic, following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. This was a time when Paris, remodelled by Baron Haussman, was becoming the City of Lights, a place of promenade and flânerie, but also of feverish consumerism and urban display, where the wives of soberly dressed men of business would advertise their husband’s status through the opulent elegance of their clothing.

This was an era where, as Marcel Proust explored in great detail in In Search of Lost Time, women expressed their personalities – in a nuanced game of performance and concealment – through their clothing: the courtesan Odette de Crécy most memorably in exquisite Orientalist tea gowns, and the imperious Duchess of Guermantes through her flamboyant choices of evening wear. Some of the most striking dresses on show at the Petit Palais were made for Countess Greffulhe (1860-1952), a great beauty with a very personal sense of style, and the inspiration for Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes. Unforgettable is a somewhat psychedelic shimmering blue silk and electric-green velvet tea gown or robe d’intérieur, made for her circa 1896-97, whose Ottoman-inspired patterning is strongly evocative of the wings of a butterfly.

The exhibition also brings to life, in a beguiling section devoted to the bustle of the Rue de la Paix’s salons and ateliers, the host of invisible women who, on several floors of the house, were engaged in patterning, cutting and sewing these wondrous and exorbitantly priced dresses, and embellishing them with personalised passementerie, ribbons and beads to make them virtually one-of-a-kind pieces. A wealth of documents, images, videos and audio stations provide vivid insights into the daily operations of the house. One group photograph dating from 1925 shows Charles’s grandson Jean-Charles Worth, by then Director of the house, his moustache carefully trimmed in the shape of an inverted W, sitting in the midst of costumed seamstresses in ‘Catherinette’ outfits, in honour of a medieval tradition kept to this day by unmarried textile workers to wear outlandish fancy dress on St Catherine’s Day – all staring at us from the past. A transporting experience.

Charles Worth: Inventing Haute Couture is at Petit Palais, Paris, until 7 September 2025.