The Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York has just opened an extraordinary new exhibition, Sargent and Paris,

in which we see how John Singer Sargent captures the personality and style of many of Paris's most noted women of society.

Along with their looks, glances, and engagement with the viewer, Sargent has given us an extraordinary documentation of the fashion worn by these women.

In this bonus encore episode, listener-favorite art and fashion historian Dr. Elizabeth L. Block

joins me for a discussion on the fashion and accessories that many of these women wore from the great

Parisian Gouture houses of the Belle Epoch. When Edith Wharton first found herself in the presence of the great Henry James, who was to become one of her closest friends, she was a young, married woman of 25, and as yet unpublished.

She was a guest at a dinner party in Paris in 1887, to which both had been invited.

Little else is actually known about that particular evening, although it seems that

Wharton felt too shy to speak to the literary master, and so their first meaningful connection

would not come until years later. What we do know something about, however, is the dress that Wharton wore for this

anticipated auspicious meeting. It was a new gown made specifically for her by the Parisian

House of Duce on the Rue de la Pais, one of the many great fashion houses concentrated on the

city's right bank. Wharton describes the gown as a tea rose pink with iridescent beads and notes with pride that

it was made by Jusei.

American women of a certain level of society in the Gilded Age could tell you all about the

dresses and gowns they wore, how they were made, which house created

them, and less often, they admitted just how much they had actually paid for them.

The intricate world of the Parisian couture houses that created these costumes for the

real Gilded Age, not a fictional filmed version, was far more tightly woven and interdependent than one might

think at first glance. This was a world that combined the vision of both designers as well as the

moneyed patrons and included an influential commercial network far beyond just the design house

whose extravagant creations went on full display at the opera and at the grand balls.

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