Memory, Made Wearable: Olivier Saillard

Olivier Saillard is one of the rare figures who think of fashion not merely as an aesthetic field, but as a discipline of memory. Now, with Le Musée Vivant de la Mode — his artistic project displayed in the windows of the Galerie Valois in the Louvre’s metro station — we hear how he is turning the traditional idea of the gallery upside down.

HAKAN BAHAR

Fashion is sometimes not an object; it is a memory shaped around an absence. When a body withdraws, what remains is not only fabric — it is the trace of a gesture, a fragment of time, the sediment of an unseen life. Olivier Saillard’s Le Musée Vivant de la Mode begins precisely in this void: in a place where the garment exists not on the hanger, but in the moment of being remembered. Here, the museum is not made of walls alone; the display windows cease to be spaces of silence, and the garment moves again — not as in a fashion show, but as if summoning back a memory. For perhaps fashion was never only what is worn; it was the way that what bodies have left behind begins to speak again. That is why the museum here is not a place that preserves, but a space that sets things in motion once more. What Saillard proposes is not a collection, but a circulation. Clothes are not stored away; they are remembered anew.

And this remembering happens not only through the eye, but through the body. A model does what a hanger cannot: not merely to carry the garment, but to live it again. This idea of a “living museum” exposes fashion’s most fragile point. For a garment is never complete on its own; it is time that completes it, and the body that has touched it that gives it meaning. That is why Saillard’s museum exhibits not objects, but absences. And perhaps for the first time, a museum chooses not to preserve the past, but to set it in motion again. Perhaps the point was never the garment itself — not its cut, not its fabric, not the value ascribed to it. The point was the trace a body leaves as it passes through it. In this living museum that Saillard proposes, the garment is no longer an object to be preserved, but becomes an experience to be remembered anew. And this experience belongs neither wholly to the past nor entirely to the present; rather than freezing on a hanger, it unravels within movement. For fashion was perhaps never only about what is visible; it was about the invisible, the carried, the forgotten but not erased. And now, for the first time, a museum chooses not to keep clothes, but to bring them back to life.

With “Le Musée Vivant de la Mode”, you take clothes out of the display case and set them in motion again. For you, when does a garment truly begin to “live”?

Issey Miyake, one of the greatest designers of the 20th century, used to say that a garment is fifty per cent complete when it leaves the studio, and reaches one hundred per cent when it is placed on a woman’s shoulders. I think he is still right, and I would add this: even when our clothes leave our shoulders and are freed from our movements, they continue to carry that naive trace of our lives…

In this project, fashion turns from a static object into something performed. When does fashion stop being an object and become an act?

Every morning and every evening, as we dress or undress from that second skin — sometimes invisible, sometimes artificial — fashion ceases to be a formal discipline, a surface of representation. Dressing is an everyday performative act so deeply embedded in our memories that no one remembers from whom, or how, they learned to button a shirt, tie a shoe or slip an arm into a sleeve. And yet all of this represents a set of actions that moves the garment from its negative state, hanging on a rail, to its positive state on our bodies.

You often speak of “archiving movement”. How can movement be archived? Does memory belong to the body or to the garment?

Memory belongs as much to the body as to the garment, which is a carbon copy of our movements and sometimes bears their trace. To archive a movement is to make it visible, to record it, to recount it, to repeat it. But sometimes it is also possible to make it visible as a lost trace of our gestures, through a garment left at the foot of a bed or on the arm of a chair.

“Fashion is a system for those who make it, an appearance for those who wear it, and a historical subject for people such as historians and researchers.”

In your work, clothes walk, breathe, crease and are mended. Is imperfection an aesthetic category for you?

Imperfection is a category that belongs to reality and to the intimate, and it is more precious than a cold, disembodied perfection.

Everyday clothes and haute couture pieces meet on the same stage. In your eyes, when do these two worlds become equal?

All clothes — whether everyday wear, haute couture or military uniforms — never stop resisting the efforts of representation and appearance. On the other hand, I see more collectivity and equality in the everyday clothes worn in common by everyone: jeans, T-shirts, grey coats, trench coats, white shirts. Through their simplicity, they bring out each of our faces and our true elegance all the more. Elegance is not a shop window; it is an attitude.

You once said that you collect clothes from the street and give them new life through performance. What gives a garment life: the object itself, or the body that wears it?

A little of both… You are right. In an abandoned garment lies the memory of the one who took it off and left, and the power of imagination of the one who finds it. To wear it again is to attribute a new life to it — one’s own life… That is exactly the triumph of vintage: its ability to exist within more than one life that has slipped away.

Your project evokes “forgotten gestures” and “abandoned words”. Is fashion a language for you? If so, how does fashion remember and how does it forget?

Ever since fashion became a matter of successive cycles, it has been a language that tries to reinvent itself and keep the commercial machine running by forgetting what it was six months ago. But against this effort, which has been going on for more than a century and a half, certain ordinary, everyday garments step outside passing fashions and resist them, functioning like contemporary traditional costumes. A white T-shirt remains conceptually more radical than any fashion design. In our homes, in our wardrobes, clothes accumulate our most intimate memories; we leave an invisible label on them. That is the intimate, and fashion does not take it into account.

So if fashion is not an object, what is it, in your view?

Fashion is a system for those who make it, an appearance for those who wear it, and a historical subject for people such as historians and researchers. In my personal view, fashion is no longer an urgent matter of our time. Everyone can dress as they wish. The fashion of the runways does not dominate social fashion, which is far more sensitive. The wider public, in my eyes, is far ahead of the runways, which are exclusive and limited.