Rick Owens, Paul Poiret and Wolfgang Tillmans: Paris’s Top Summer Exhibitions

There are three exhibitions worth noting: Paul Poiret: Fashion is a Feast at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (open from 25 June), Rick Owens, Temple of Love at Palais Galliera (open from 28 June), and Wolfgang Tillmans: Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us at the Centre Pompidou (open from 13 June, and the final exhibition before the Centre’s closure for renovation). The interesting thing about this trio is that they stand, essentially, at the three apexes of a triangle, yet are bonded by a thread of daring and uncompromising vision.

Let’s start with Poiret. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs casts a lavish spotlight on the self-styled “King of Fashion” with 550 works spanning his broad-spilling imagination, including fashion pieces, accessories, and fine and decorative arts. Poiret was considered audacious; his creativity might suggest his job was more fantasist than couturier. Though, of course, he could cut a fabulous dress (Poiret is credited with freeing women from the corset and ushering in the more draped, high-waisted silhouettes of the Belle Époque into the Roaring Twenties). Poiret’s ultra-dynamic mind was ahead of its time (multi-hyphenate creators are now the name of the game); he was unafraid to colour outside the lines. Think of him as fashion’s first contemporary auteur.

At the Palais Galliera, Owens’s retrospective traces a thick, inky line from the designer’s early work in Los Angeles through to his most recent collections, which are conceived and shown in Paris. Over the decades, the remarkable thing about Owens is that his vision has changed little: his oeuvre is a striking, insistent and sometimes haunting declaration that beauty does not – should not – belong strictly to its saccharine clichés. Owens is the showcase’s artistic director, too, so viewers will be immersed directly into his mindset — a world of high (even camp) glamour and brooding and rage and restraint. There is even a recreation of his and his partner Michèle Lamy’s old bedroom in California, as well as an outdoor garden component with California-native plantings. This is the key to understanding Owens: he, and his work, can look hard-edged, but past the charred veneer is an unusual and enthralling softness. He’s a man entirely in his own realm, and his work is all the better for it.

Until 22 September, the Centre Pompidou has handed its vast 6,000-square-metre second floor to Wolfgang Tillmans for a curatorial experiment that marks the close of its exhibition programme (the Pompidou is projected to remain shuttered until 2030, during which it will undergo a complete to-the-studs transformation). In true Tillmans fashion, the German artist eschews linear retrospection in favour of a living, breathing installation that blurs the boundaries between library and gallery. Interrogating the architecture and intellectual function of the Pompidou’s Bibliothèque Publique d’Information, the show unfolds as a layered dialogue between image and space, and it spans over three decades of work –  portraiture, abstraction, still life, documentary, and more – all with Tillmans’ singular diaristic eye. The artist has been popular with fashion fixtures (and the fashionable) over the years, such as with photographing backstage at Bottega Veneta’s Berghain show, for example, or shooting Frank Ocean’s now-famous album cover for Blond. As somewhere in the middle between Poiret and Owens, Tillmans’ output – like these designers – is about capturing what’s real, without any airs of mimicry or sycophancy, and never compromising.

And finally, let’s not forget that the Louvre’s couture-based expo Louvre Couture, Art and Fashion: Statement Pieces is still on, and will stay open through 24 August. As is the Petit Palais’ Charles Worth exhibition called Worth: Inventing Haute Couture. This show runs through 4 September.