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The Living Museum of Fashion, daily performance by Olivier Saillard & guests

  • Events, Paris
  • Sun 08 Mar → Sat 21 Mar 2026, 17:00
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Olivier Saillard Le Musée Vivant de la Mode 2026 3
Le Musée Vivant de la Mode © Olivier Saillard Photo © Gabriele Rosati

Location

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

2, place du Palais-Royal

75001 Paris

Directions

Price

Included in the exhibition ticket

Specially designed and imagined for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, The Living Museum of Fashion is an unprecedented performance through which Olivier Saillard attempts to construct an ephemeral yet attainable edifice.

The result of years of reflection on museum practices and the preservation of costumes—key concerns of the artist—and a culmination of twenty years of performances exploring various alternatives to archiving clothing, The Living Museum of Fashion tells the story of a discipline at a time when fads and uses have vanished, relegating everyday second skins to the realm of the forgotten and the scorned.

Beige linen dresses worn on the bodies of live models act as mobile display screens and serve as the pedestals for a succession of extinct accessories, fragments of faded garments, overlooked expressions, and worn-out costumes, while a daily lecture presents the status of these marginalized works in official fashion collections. 

Another history of fashion, intentionally more social than stylistic, celebrates, through the restoration of the gesture and the spoken word, generations of anonymous but proud garments, work clothes, and embodied aristocrats that have long since been erased. 

This is a manifesto for a new fashion museum where movement is archived as much as form. The performance aims to offer new responses to the silence and immobility of clothes formerly presented in display cases and exhibitions.

Olivier Saillard Spectacle 2026 1

Olivier Saillard

Olivier Saillard is a graduate in art history, former director of the Palais Galliera – Paris Fashion Museum, currently director of the Alaïa Foundation and artistic, image and culture director for the J.M. Weston brand. Since then, alongside his work as a historian, he has pursued a poetic reflection presented in the form of performances, the most notable of which, Impossible Wardrobe with Tilda Swinton, inaugurated a ten-year cycle of collaboration. Similarly, Models never talk with a studio of famous models, established a new form in response to conventional fashion shows.

In 2018, he founded 'Moda Povera', a poetic, performative, and pedagogical clothing creation company based on the transformation of ordinary and modest garments, magnified by haute couture knowledge and techniques.

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