“In this living museum of fashion, bordering on disappearance, clothes sink, colors fade, scarves constrict, shawls suffocate, ties choke, fans lose their breath, handkerchiefs tear, socks ladder, gloves abandon, pockets empty, hats break, long dresses die from stretching.”
This brief description by Olivier Saillard sums up the spirit of the project Le Musée Vivant de la Mode (The Living Museum of Fashion), presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain from March 8 to 21. Saillard is a fashion historian and curator: he was director of the Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris and is now director of the Azzedine Alaïa Foundation and director of art, image and culture for the J.M. Weston brand. Alongside his academic work, he has developed poetic research through performances dedicated to fashion. Among them, Impossible Wardrobe, made with Tilda Swinton, inaugurated a 10-year collaboration, while Models Never Talk proposed a performative alternative to traditional fashion shows. In 2018 he also founded Moda Povera, a creative and pedagogical project that transforms everyday and modest garments by enhancing them through haute couture techniques and knowledge.
This background of his finds new life in this wonderful project. Designed especially for the Fondation Cartier, The Living Museum of Fashion is an unprecedented performance through which Saillard attempts to construct a kind of ephemeral museum. The project stems from years of reflection on museum practices and costume conservation and is the culmination of two decades of performances exploring alternative ways of archiving clothing. The performance tells the story of a discipline at a time when fashions and customs seem to have vanished, relegating everyday second skins to the realm of oblivion and contempt.
Beige linen dresses, worn by living models, become movable exhibition screens and serve as pedestals for a succession of extinct accessories, fragments of faded garments, forgotten expressions and worn-out costumes. In parallel, a daily lecture presents the status of these marginalized works within official fashion collections. What emerges is another history of fashion, intentionally more social than stylistic, celebrating, through the recovery of gesture and word, generations of anonymous but proud garments: work clothes, everyday garments and embodied aristocracies now erased by time.
Le Musée Vivant de la Mode is thus both text and performance, conceived as a manifesto. Saillard advocates the idea of a fashion museum that endures and breathes, unlike traditional museums-where clothes are presented as immobile objects-restoring them to life through movement, gesture, and intimacy. Underlying this is an idea that is also often discussed in musicology and contemporary art practices: the archive of works should not just be a repository of the past, kept within the sterile walls of a building, but a living space in which art can continually reinvent and reinterpret itself in light of the present.
The same goes for clothing. Remnants of life, they carry within them the traces of our lives: time, travels, encounters. They are true relics. Fashion itself, Saillard says, is like a flower destined to wither and be reborn every year. The performance thus becomes a staging of dying clothes, witnesses to a fading experience, but also to an ongoing cyclical nature. It is, finally, a manifesto for a new fashion museum, in which movement is archived as much as form.
[📷 fondationcartier.com]
