Musée éphémère de la mode France / Paris
Olivier Saillard curator

Recently brought to life in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, based on  collections from the Galerie du Costume et de la Mode, the Ephemeral  Museum of Fashion intends, at its own level, to make up for the rarity  of institutions devoted to textile creations. Launched on the initiative  of Olivier Saillard, performer, historian and former director of the  Palais Galliera, the project stands out thanks to the inventiveness of  its hanging, which has been thought out so as to run up against academia  and institutional museums. Its presentation thus breaks away both from  rankings and chronologies, so as to think out a dramaturgy with a direct  contact with the site that hosts it. The costumes and accessories are  not just associated according to their chromatic affinities or the  closeness of their materials, but also, and above all, in a way which is  often intuitive, with no claim to establishing a reasoned order. Thanks  to a scenography which is as elegant as it is unexpected, this mobile  museum is an invitation to a journey of a totally new sort that remodels  our relationship with clothes and the way we look at them. So it is  that the Ephemeral Museum of Fashion introduces an exhibition time that  completely breaks away from the frenzied pace of catwalks, to provide  the pieces with the chance to be contemplated patiently, if not  attentively. With this itinerant project, unlike any other, Olivier  Saillard is attempting to give an original solution to the equation  opposing the fugitive nature of fashion to the permanence of heritage  collections, thus producing a kind of synthesis between the fleeting and  the eternal.

Source: program of the CND

Olivier Saillard was the director of the Palais Galliera (Paris Fashion Museum) until 2018. A famous fashion historian, he has been the curator of a large number of successful exhibitions such as Alaïa, followed by Jeanne Lanvin at the Palais Galliera, Paris Haute Couture at the Hôtel de Ville de Paris, Madame Grès, la couture à l’œuvre at the Bourdelle museum, Andy Warhol et la mode at the Musée de la Mode de Marseille and at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Museum of Decorative Arts): Christian Lacroix, histoires de mode – Yohji Yamamoto, juste des vêtements – Sonia Rykiel, Exhibition – Couturiers Superstars, etc. He is the author of a complete Histoire idéale de la mode contemporaine (Ed. Textuel). Award winner of the Villa Kujoyama, he conducts a poetic work presented in the form of performances. As part of the Paris Festival d’Automne, he created with Tilda Swinton three performances: The Impossible Wardrobe (2012), The Eternity Dress (2013) and Cloakroom (2014). In 2015, Models Never Talk, presented in New York and then at the CND, recreates the memories of seven models invited to come on stage. More recently, he presented at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (Paris Modern Art Museum) a performance featuring Charlotte Rampling and Tilda Swinton, inspired by images taken from the collections of the Maison européenne de la Photographie.

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).