Complete crepe, egg, ham, cheese!
Collection No.26
14 masks from the César company under original license.
This Disney-inspired collection includes four masks of characters from the animated film The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Quasimodo, Esmeralda, Judge Claude Frollo, and Phoebus de Châteaupers, Captain of the Guard, as well as Hercules, Aladdin, the Wolf and the Little Pig, a cap depicting the Grandmother Wolf, Cinderella, the dragon Mushu, and Beauty and the Beast. All the masks, except Aladdin's, are in very good condition. This collection, in excellent state of preservation, is distinguished by its remarkable thematic coherence and the presence of pieces that are particularly difficult to assemble today.
The quality of the materials, the stability of the colors, and the integrity of the forms attest to exemplary preservation, rare for this type of object from late 20th-century popular culture.
There are objects that don't just exist: they carry memories within them.
These César masks, made in Saumur between the 1960s and 2000, are among them. They evoke Wednesday afternoons, school parties, the colorful shop windows of bazaars, impromptu costumes, and the bursts of children's laughter that now exist only in memory.
Each mask is a fragment of an era, a piece of light from a time when airbrushes were still used, when colors vibrated under the hand of an artisan, when plastic wasn't just an ordinary material but a promise of magic.
Some still have their original labels, others their slightly worn elastic—like a tender scar, proof that they have lived, that they have been loved.
Hanging them in your home is like opening a small window onto childhood, onto French popular culture, onto the heroes and monsters that populated our imaginations. It's creating a wall gallery unlike any other, a gallery that tells a story: yours, theirs, the story of a lost but never forgotten craft.
Light as memories, graphic like fairground posters, they hang on the wall in an instant. And because they are precious, fragile, irreplaceable, each one travels in reinforced packaging, designed to protect what it carries: a little piece of our past.
