Très Parisien, 1925, No. 6, Pl. 16.- CONFIDENCE 1925

Curator: Looking at this piece, my immediate feeling is… well, a gentle kind of knowingness. There’s a lightness to the composition, a whispered secret. Editor: It's funny you say that because I see something far more grounded. The title of this gouache piece from 1925, “Très Parisien, No. 6, Pl. 16 - Confidence", made by G-P. Joumard, speaks volumes. Look at the embroidery, the crepe Georgette, and even the provenance listed as "Tissus de A. Prevost, de Lyon". This is about materials, manufacturing, labor… Parisian fashion reduced to consumable signs of aspiration. Curator: Absolutely! It’s both aspirational and intimately contained, wouldn't you say? This isn’t some grand pronouncement; it's confidence held close. The Art Deco styling emphasizes flattened forms and decorative details that frame the intimate nature of the figures' confidence, making the whole piece radiate with tender conviction. I mean, one’s even serenading the other with a flute. It seems more romantic than political. Editor: The romantic is entirely constructed from textile and manufacturing technologies and fashion dissemination strategies. A Lyons textile house advertisement masked as discreet artwork. The confidence isn’t internal; it’s in the wearing, the acquisition. It reduces down to the quality and availability of those fabrics during the time, accessible to a specific class… which, perhaps, felt quite romantic to those living in the moment. Curator: I see what you mean. It is absolutely a manufactured ideal, but I think what moves me is that even within those confines, within that constructed reality, these figures find a quiet power and shared secret. And perhaps we see not the "confidence" the text ascribes to the figure as the artist suggesting it to be more aspirational, in the wearer’s action. It leaves it open to question what confidence looks and sounds like—as both wearers strike poses of both doing, and just existing with the other, knowing or perhaps unknown to them. Editor: Maybe...or maybe that knowing wink simply communicates who's “in the know," regarding how a fine fabric feels. At the very least it makes the piece into more than just an innocent expression—more than meets the eye. Curator: A shared joke perhaps, or a way of signaling status. Thanks to the detail in this artwork, Joumard certainly provides much for the viewers to project and receive from this "Confidence". I feel very different about the figures’ "confidence," for the better. Editor: I'll concede—materiality has a confidence all its own! Thanks for changing my point of view too.