Mention Haute Couture and most of us will conjure up in their minds visions of grand and magnificent styles, opulent fabrics and intricate embellishments. Yet it doesn't have to be always like that, as proved by Olivier Saillard's "Moda Povera" collection showcased in Paris, during Haute Couture Week.
Saillard, better known for being the chief curator of the city's Palais Galliera costume and fashion museum, and the current artistic director of the luxury men's footwear brand J.M. Weston, curated in his career over 140 impeccable exhibitions, but threatened to cross the fine line between the elegant and the pretentious during some of the presentations he did in the last few years in the role of a performance artist.
While Saillard's museum installations have indeed been excellent, his performances such as "Cloakroom" with Tilda Swinton, while acclaimed by the fashion intelligentsia, proved rather cold (would they have been praised if, rather than Saillard and Swinton, they had featured two newcomers unknown to the fashion industry?).
In June Saillard continued along the same lines with "Défilé for 27 Shoes", a presentation for J.M. Weston that featured dancer, choreographer and head of the French National Center for Dance Mathilde Monnier. The 20-minute introspectively philosophical performance revolved around the heritage styles and the history of the brand, founded in 1891, and consisted in Monnier walking, dancing and moving next to a row of shoes by Weston.
Leaving more pretentious moods behind, during Paris Haute Couture Week, Saillard opted instead for a more humble approach.
In the last few months he looked on the Internet for €5 XXXL T-shirts (the random palette including white, peacock green, black, egg yolk orange and bright red depended from the stock Saillard found on the Internet...) and slashed, pleated, draped and folded the garments, radically transforming this humble wardrobe staple into a series of refined designs.
While the name of the 27-piece collection, "Moda Povera", was borrowed from the "Arte Povera" movement and from its principles such as using the most commonplaces materials, fashion-wise the main inspiration was Madame Grès's draping and the final aim was transforming the most common item seen in the streets - a basic T-shirt - into something more beautiful and unique.
Saillard is more than just a fan of the French designer since he curated the 2011 exhibition "Madame Grès: Couture at Work" at the Musée Bourdelle, in which Grès' creations were juxtaposed to Antoine Bourdelle's sculptures.
Shirts were therefore adapted and turned into dresses or tunics, they were enriched not with visually striking elements like beads, sequins and embroideries, but with architectural elements that reshaped them; they were slashed open around the back, twisted into new configurations, or cropped to expose the waist and some of the midriff.
Wearers, Saillard suggested, could also try additional tricks with these garments: to renew these reinvented pieces even more, they could indeed wear them back-to-front (three red thread cross-stitches point to the wearer which side is actually the front of the garment).
Saillard didn't do everything by himself, but worked on the designs with the help of Martine Lenoir, Madame Grès's last seamstress in the '70s and 80s. There was also another connection with Grès: some of the garments were modelled by Axelle Doué, who worked as mannequin for the French designer in the early 1980s.
Madame Grès herself stated in the 1980 documentary "Portrait de Madame Grès" by Marie-José Lepicard, "In all these collections I have done in solitude there is a lot of me woven-in", and in this case the idea was weaving in the simple fabric Grès' techniques. Though simple, the shirts followed therefore the rules and principles of high fashion, so that grosgrain inner waistbands and organza panels were employed to secure the pleats from the inside.
The event called to mind other performances in which Saillard tried to show how fashion can effortlessly be beautiful such as his "Couture Essentielle" that featured models in black leotards who draped and wrapped different fabrics around their bodies to construct a series of dresses. While that was a one-off performance, this should instead be the first collection by the Studio Olivier Saillard label, which is run from an atelier on the Rue des Petits Champs.
Hopefully Saillard will focus more in future on humbleness and on projects that are about passion and not just about conceptual gestures with big names as main players, after all, as Madame Grès stated in Lepicard's documentary, couture is "a work of architecture and needs a lot of heart."
This presentation set indeed your creative juices in motion, prompting you to try and learn from scratch the principles of dressmaking and proving that couture can be created from any material, once you study and retain the technique.
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