PARIS — It is a myth dearly beloved of the contemporary fashion industry that World War I was when everything changed (at least when it came to clothes): Women cast off their corsets, flocked to factories and found a new kind of freedom.

But as France continues to mark the centenary of the Great War, a Paris exhibition offers a more nuanced — and potentially controversial — take on the subject.

In “Mode et Femmes, 14/18,” which runs through June 17 at the Bibliothèque Forney, the curators Maude Bass-Krueger and Sophie Kurkdjian show that if the war accelerated modernization already underway, fashion also reflected profound anxiety about women’s liberation.

The exhibition reopens the Bibliothèque Forney, a public research library for the decorative and applied arts, after extensive renovations. The building, in the Marais, is one of Paris’s rare remaining medieval houses. It contains significant archives of wallpaper, posters and fashion magazines.