What Marie Wore: An Early Encounter

The photographs were taken during a visit to the Château de La Napoule in August 2026, at the outset of a longer-term project I am developing around Marie Clews's surviving clothing. Marie Clews was an American architect and landscape designer who, together with her husband, the sculptor Henry Clews Jr., left New York for France in the years following their 1914 marriage. The upheaval of the First World War and a flu epidemic eventually led them south, where a real estate broker showed them the Château de La Napoule, a ruined fourteenth-century castle near Cannes that had most recently served as a glass factory. Over the next seventeen years, the couple transformed it into an eccentric, deeply personal world: Marie worked as the architect and landscape designer, adding a turreted gatehouse, ramparts, seaside terraces, and acres of gardens, while Henry filled the building with his sculpture. After Henry's death in 1937, and through the disruptions of the Second World War, Marie remained devoted to the Château, eventually founding the La Napoule Art Foundation in 1951 to preserve their home and legacy as an international center for the arts — the institution that still stewards the Château, its collection, and its residency program today. .

It is within this history that I encountered Marie's surviving clothing, kept among the Foundation's collection. These photographs represent an early, exploratory encounter with that material — not the full scope of the work, but a first gesture toward the visual language I am continuing to develop. Clothing, as I understand it, is never empty of its past. It is a second skin, a container of stories, a trace that remains when the body that animated it is no longer present. These images are an initial attempt to let that trace speak.

The first photograph is a close-up detail of a lace sleeve, photographed against the backdrop of one of the Château's stained-glass windows. The layering of the two materials — fragile lace over luminous coloured glass — was not staged so much as discovered: light passing through the window caught the sleeve in a way that made the lace itself seem to glow from within, its pattern briefly indistinguishable from the leadwork of the window behind it. This pairing speaks directly to the premise driving my research: that Marie Clews's clothing cannot be separated from the larger visual world she built at the Château, a world in which architecture, craft, and self-presentation were of a single sensibility. The image asks what it means for a garment to be lit, quite literally, by the same hand that shaped the building around it.

The second photograph documents a kimono-style robe in a palette of pink, red, green, and yellow that unmistakably echoes the colours of the stained glass captured in the first image. Photographing this piece, I found myself imagining Marie wearing it in a private, domestic moment — having tea, perhaps, in a rare instance of repose within a life otherwise staged as fully as any sculpture or garden. This imagined scene is not incidental to my method: I have come to understand the wardrobe as holding multiple, unreconciled versions of Marie — the romantic wanderer, the architect, the widow building a legacy alone — and this robe belongs to a version rarely visible in the archive: Marie at rest, in colour and comfort, within a domestic register the Château's grander spaces do not usually reveal. The garment's continuity of palette with the building's own decorative language suggests that even in private, Marie's aesthetic world did not switch off.

Alongside these, I have also begun photographing smaller details across the collection. These fragments interest me for what they reveal at a scale the eye does not usually linger on — the exact tension of a stitch, the small calculated flash of a jewel meant to catch light from across a room. Looked at closely, they read almost as their own vocabulary: a set of decisions about colour, texture, and finish that Marie made again and again, across very different garments, until they add up to something like a signature. I am not attempting to catalogue every object in the collection here, but these details are already shaping how I think about the larger body of work — as a study built as much from small, exacting gestures as from any single, complete garment.

Taken together, these photographs are best understood as a research sketch — an early proof of concept for a much larger body of work. They demonstrate an approach — close, textural attention to individual garments, read in dialogue with the specific architecture and light of the Château — that I plan to expand considerably in the phases ahead, working directly with the Foundation's full collection, across multiple garments, rooms, and seasons of light, and moving where appropriate into mixed media and performance. What they offer here is a first proof of sensibility: evidence that I can find, in a single sleeve, a single seam, or a single stitch,

Many thanks to Cynthia Imogen Hammond for telling me about the existence of some Marie Clews' wardrobe at the LNAF and to Ray Brand and Anna J. Modeer for making it possible for me to see and photograph these beautiful examples of her clothes.

The third photograph shows the back of an ivory-coloured dress, notable for a long attached cape secured at the shoulders with sequined epaulettes. Photographed from behind, the garment's structure becomes almost architectural in its own right — the cape falling in a single unbroken line, the sequins catching light in small, deliberate points along the shoulder seam. This image speaks to a corporeal question at the centre of my research: what shape of body, what bearing, what gesture is implied by a garment we can no longer see worn? The cape's structure suggests a particular carriage — shoulders held a certain way, a train managed with some practiced ease — that gestures toward the body's absence even as it makes that absence materially present. This is precisely the tension I intend to pursue at scale: using the Foundation's collection, together with any available archival photographs of Marie, to conduct a material study of what has been salvaged, and to develop from it a fuller visual and, where possible, performative record of her self-fashioning within the environments she designed.