From the Maghreb to Japan, through the countries of the Middle East,

India and China, the exhibition traces the thousand-year history of gold in the textile arts. A fascinating story of artistic creation, traditional expertise and technical invention.

As early as the fifth millennium B.C., gold was used to embellish the first luxury fabrics for men of power. Over the centuries that followed, skilled weavers and craftsmen – Roman, Byzantine, Chinese, Persian and then Muslim – used the most ingenious techniques to create veritable fabrics of art where silk or linen fibres were intertwined with golden threads and lamé. From the first ornaments sewn onto the garments of the deceased to the flamboyant dresses of Chinese fashion designer Guo Pei, from the brocade caftans of the Maghreb and the East to the silks of the Indian and Indonesian worlds to the glittering kimonos of the Edo period, the exhibition takes visitors on a journey following the golden threads, split into two historical and technical sections and

five sections corresponding to five major geographical and cultural areas.