Le Musée Vivant de la Mode: Olivier Saillard in praise of the ordinary at the Fondation Cartier

What is a “Musée Vivant de la Mode”: a living museum of fashion as its name suggests? Or a place that allows the archive to breathe again, where clothing is no longer frozen into a glorious but lifeless artefact, and rediscovers a sound, a gesture, a presence. It is the culmination of an obsession that runs through Saillard's entire career: from the major French fashion institutions he has directed, to the 30 or so performances he has been developing for over 20 years across the world, to the dozens of books he has written. “Museums only preserve the pinnacle of fashion, while everyday clothing tends to be redirected to museums of folk tradition. I find that unfair. A denim shirt or a football shirt, for example, are part of fashion. You see them everywhere on the streets,” he says. Walking through a fashion exhibition may feel like wandering among empty silhouettes, “taxidermized dresses,” he says. “I think of Issey Miyake, who used to say that a garment was only half-finished when it left the studio, and only complete once it was worn. In between, we shouldn’t overlook all the time it would spend on a hanger. The Musée Vivant de la Mode takes these different space-times into account.”

“I always carry a bin bag with me, and whenever I see an item of clothing on the street, I pick it up, wash it and give it a new lease of life through performances. It’s a fashion category in itself, the performance.”

Saillard chose to set up his museum at the Fondation Cartier, within the vast new space on Place du Palais-Royal redesigned by Jean Nouvel, the architect behind the Arab World Institute and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. From March 6th to 21st, the programme will be divided into four key events: an inaugural version with nine mannequins; a performance with Paloma Picasso; another with Tilda Swinton; and an extension in the windows of the Galerie Valois at the Palais-Royal metro station. Saillard himself will be the guiding thread. “Every afternoon, from Wednesday to Sunday, I will be like a museum guide or a theatre figure, explaining the purpose of this Musée Vivant de la Mode – its questioning and its themes.” On March 6th and 7th, he will be joined by nine distinguished models, including Axelle Doué, who was Claude Montana's muse, Violeta Sanchez and Amalia Vairelli, who collaborated with Yves Saint Laurent. “These women were very close to the couturiers. They laugh when I say that, but I asked them to come and embody this living heritage. During the day, the pieces remain on display, abandoned on beige canvas dresses and mobile picture rails, which evoke “the idea of Bluebeard, of those hanging bodies.” He sought out these pieces himself in flea markets, museums, on the street, and online. Mechanics' trousers, which he says were “quite impossible to date, especially since they have been re-embroidered and repaired countless times,” were entrusted to Erdal Pinarci, Azzedine Alaïa’s loyal collaborator since 1996, with a simple instruction: “Make me a very Alaïa jacket. The most chic jacket in the world with all these workers’ trousers.” The poetry of the ordinary is particularly magnified in a bespoke composition for Violeta Sanchez, with “Opéra pour un pull gris” (“Opera for a grey sweater”). “It’s astounding that a grey sweater can be in a museum collection when its owners have long since turned to ashes. I want to play on these paradoxes.” Ordinary recycled clothes are mixed with exceptional archive pieces. “There is, in particular, a Balenciaga dress that is too damaged, too worn for a museum to accept, but nevertheless splendid.”

The Musée Vivant de la Mode is a collection of affinities, of personalities who have experienced and actively participated in the transformations of this sector, of cherished garments, and of Saillard’s favourite authors. The adventure begins with Giacomo Leopardi and his Dialogue between Fashion and Death, composed in 1824, “in which the two entities attempt to prove to each other which is quicker at shortening life,” he explains. Where death attacks the body, fashion attacks customs – in appearances and forms – which it imposes only to better dismiss them, each fashion having to wait for the death of the previous one to establish itself.

“With Paloma Picasso, we will present the idea of a large book unfolding before us. I like the idea that it is only made of memories.”

On March 13th and 14th, Paloma Picasso takes to the stage. The daughter of artists Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot, she is a figure whose creative power influenced an entire period, right up to her signature iconic jewellery designs for Tiffany & Co. Together with Saillard, they will evoke the spirit of Yves Saint Laurent through the Spring-Summer 1971 collection, inspired by Paloma Picasso. “She arrived at the previous fashion show dressed in 1940s style, with her red lipstick that she bought at the flea market because it was bright red, unlike the makeup available at the time, which was going through a wave of androgyny. Yves Saint Laurent saw her, loved her style and decided to use it as inspiration for his next collection,” he explains. What a scandal! Women who had lived through the war refused to see any form of beauty or nostalgia in this period of history. “It was also a fashion of emancipation. Women could move around. As a historian, this is what accompanied this fashion, which was much freer to live than those of previous decades,” Saillard continues. On these evenings, it will not be a question of re-enacting a fashion show, but of evoking it through storytelling. “We will not be presenting clothes, but a memory.”

“I want to place Tilda Swinton alongside these plastic mannequins that are meant to imitate the living body.”

On March 20th and 21st, it will be Tilda Swinton’s turn. For more than ten years, the Oscar-winning actress and the historian have been collaborating with great complicity, which necessarily enhances the depth of their performances. “I'm going to dress her up as a workshop mannequin,” he says, with the playful eye of a child having fun. “She will wear a padded jumpsuit and perform something quite static, immobile, in front of mannequin heads, those sometimes frightening busts that we see in window displays.” Such a strange invention, these mannequins, with their frozen smiles set in resin which often distract the eye from the clothing. “The mannequin, the dummy – they also say a lot about the industrialisation of the body,” he points out, contemplating a superbly damaged 19th-century bust sitting on his desk. “This curve is supposed to be that of a naked body, but it isn’t, because it has the shape of a corset. Even when we are supposed to be creating clothing for the body, we create it on a garment, on a facsimile that is already dressed, constrained, resized by the garment. The idea of the nude is never nude.”

“I conceived the installation in the underground as an introduction to the Museum – what it could be at rest, in a display window.”

In partnership with the RATP, the Fondation Cartier is extending Le Musée Vivant de la Mode to the Paris metro. The installation will be presented in the windows of the Galerie Valois, a passageway in the Palais-Royal metro station with Belle Époque wood panelling dating from 1908, contemporary with the Grands Magasins du Louvre in their heyday (it was founded in 1855, three years after the inauguration of Le Bon Marché). “We found an article in La Mode Illustrée in which the journalist spoke of a frenzy among the population, who rushed to buy ready-made dresses and pre-made corsets,” Saillard says. “These ready-made dresses were addressed to a wealthy clientele, at a time when women sewed their own clothes or had them made by a dressmaker. It was the first economic development of what would become ready-to-wear fashion.” In the windows, Saillard has placed mannequins in the position of visitors. “People will look at the works and be works themselves. There are also empty suitcases, in the spirit of a travelling exhibition. We are looking at life itself.”

And this is remarkably close to where Saillard’s career began. As a young curator at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, he would sometimes doze off in the storage rooms, then located in the Louvre buildings, under the half-moon windows on the first floor. “I only did this three or four times, but I remember one afternoon, when I woke up, I felt, with great clarity, as if I were in my parents’ attic. This Musée Vivant de la Mode had been my geography for a long time.”

Reuben Attia