During Paris Fashion Week, Olivier Saillard added a new title—artist in residence—to his ever-growing roster. This month, the star fashion curator will be appearing daily, and occasionally in the evening, for performances at the brand new Fondation Cartier at the Palais-Royal, opposite the Louvre.
To mark the opening of its new iteration, the result of a €230 million-plus renovation by architect Jean Nouvel, the contemporary art center invited Saillard to stage a multi-faceted exhibition-slash-installation about fashion. The theme he landed on, he said, is a response to an eternal—and ultimately personal—conundrum, namely that “museums kill fashion.”
“Things look very beautiful under glass, like taxidermied animal trophies in a chateau,” Saillard told Vogue in an exclusive interview. “It’s not that I’m assassinating 30 years of work; it’s a reality. All those clothes on display or in the reserves are a bit like ghosts.”
Given the impossibility of letting prized holdings be reworn—in any case, he’s against the idea—choreographing such happenings has become Saillard’s personal campaign to breathe life back into the mix.
“Clothing that’s on display no longer belongs to anybody, really, except the designer who made it,” he said. “But the part that’s always fascinated me is the person who wore it, the space between animate and inanimate. Otherwise, it’s like gazing at a historic instrument without ever hearing its music.”
In his spare time, he’s been busy amassing what he calls “a museum of last chances, made up of forgotten, patched-up, anonymous things that you’d never find in an institutional collectsion.” After a beat, he added: “And gestures, too, because those can’t be stored in a drawer.”
Fashion moments, too. Tonight, March 13, Saillard will bring a historic event back to life with Répertoire n°1: Yves Saint Laurent 1971, The Scandal Collection, starring Paloma Picasso, whose personal style inspired that show.
“When she first told me about it, I felt almost like I was reliving the moment,” Saillard said. “I thought, here is a collectsion inspired by war, and the name Paloma symbolizes peace. There was something in all of that that I find very joyful.”
Speaking from Switzerland, Picasso declined to disclose details about her appearance but shared some thoughts on her style then and now. For one, Scandal backlash took her completely by surprise.
“The press was so negative, I couldn’t understand why it would be so horrible,” she said. Not having lived through the war myself but having seen [pictures and films of] all those gorgeous creatures—glamour to its maximum—I thought that’s what I wanted to emulate. I saw it as something positive that French women were using dress as an act of resistance, a reaction to actually dress as fabulously as they could.”
She also shared that her signature red lipstick actually dates back to her first day of preschool. “I was three years old, my mother said, okay, now you’re all dressed up, you can go to school,” Picasso recalled. “And I said, ‘But you didn’t put lipstick on me. When you go out you wear lipstick, so I have to wear lipstick—I’m going out.’And I had a fit, crying, ‘Well, I’m going to be ridiculous if I go without lipstick.’” Gamely, her mother, Françoise Gilot, complied and never asked how the look went over at school.
On Yves Saint Laurent choosing her as a muse: “You don’t decide somebody is your muse just because of what they are,” Picasso said. “It’s because they do something different, because they evoke something special to you.” Once she started getting serious about designing jewelry, her style shifted yet again, defined by those red lips and, most often, black. “I found that I didn’t want the clothes to take away from my jewelry,” she said. “I’ve managed to steer people’s view of me through what I’ve created myself. And that, I suppose, has been my great victory.”
Next weekend, Tilda Swinton will be in Paris to wrap up the residency with Silent Models, her fifth collaboration with Saillard. The script, which they penned together, is their “strangest yet,” he said. Props include items the curator has been collectsing for years, like handkerchiefs, French worker blues, and mannequins he described as “a whole taxonomy of objects that have tried and failed to replace the human body since the 19th century.”
In an email, Swinton called their quest “a rich dialogue.”
“Every choice we make, every time we reach for a garment—if we are, indeed, free to choose what we wear - we are attending to a response inside: is this piece of material a match for my spirit in this moment, is this garment representative of what I want to present to the world today, how I want to communicate my sense of identity in this moment?” she mused, following up with a response: “I would suggest that one’s sense of identity is a truly flexible and ever-evolving matter (…) clothes need us just as we need them. The quest for a harmonious and expressive conversation is a profoundly nourishing affair.”
The show’s gestures—intimate revelations about what, in fact, isn’t there—were also a departure for her, she wrote.
“Absence is never far away from any examination of an archive of clothes. The presence of these phantoms is the real material of both the performance and of the exhibition. Engagement with [them] leads to the enlightenment and integration upon which true evolution depends.”
As to the “futile” items in Saillard’s collectsion, the Oscar-winning actress allowed that she adores “the labor of a necktie. And, whatever the hygienic advantages of a paper tissue, I am a diehard champion of the handkerchief.”
The Living Museum of Fashion by Olivier Saillard & guests runs at the Fondation Cartier in Paris through Saturday, March 21.
