"It was an incredible exhibition for which Olivier Saillard directed the fashion section related to the body and its contemporary history.
It was an incredible historical exhibition, co-produced with Marseille's Musée d'Art Contemporain (MAC)! Over the course of the century, it looked at the fascination that artists and fashion designers had with the body as a source or medium of creation.
With the necessary distance from the various representations, the exhibition questioned the works, and analyzed the status of so-called body art, as society may experience it, obscure it, oppress it or, worse still, deny it.
It also presented rituals based on living matter (the body), cross-dressing, wounds (Andy Wharol), physical resistance (Dennis Oppenheim), endangerment (Chris Burden), etc. Fashion was addressed by Olivier Saillard, taking as his starting point the question: "Does the Western and contemporary conception of clothing, whatever it may be, play a major role in this voluntary exposure of the body, and its obvious revelation?
He took as his examples Elsa Schiaparelli, Madeleine Vionnet, Yves Saint-Laurent and Azzedine Alaïa, whose constant quest to enhance the female body was the common thread running through all his creations.
As this exhibition has taught us, the incessant history of contemporary fashion has been formulated around two axes: the addition and subtraction of artifice that negotiates a silhouette in the wind. The other leans towards a constant nudity, updated by the ever-massive use of elastic and transparent materials.
Fashion has become a veritable field of analysis, and the younger generation of designers, such as Isabelle Ballu and Fred Sathal, have no hesitation in experimenting with other, more poetic and carnal paths, where it tends to join a more vegetal aspect or an animality long considered taboo ...
