“Offbeat… Provençal… close to costume… wholly charming,” is how Vogue described Christian Lacroix’s debut collection in 1987. But Lacroix never intended to become a fashion designer. “I was a fashion designer by accident,” he said this weekend at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s campus in the French commune of Lacoste where a new exhibition celebrating his partnership with the Comédie-Française was opening. “Christian Lacroix Habille Peer Gynt Pour la Comédie-Française,” focuses on the costumes Lacroix created for the 2012 production of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. It is curated by fashion historian and curator Olivier Saillard and organized by SCAD FASH director of fashion exhibitions Rafael Gomes.
Lacroix explained that what he always wanted to do was work in costume and in curation: “I connected with the escapism of movies and theater, I didn’t like real life, so I wanted to be a costume designer.” He won the Molière Award, France’s national theater prize, for Best Costume Designer not once, but twice: first for Phèdre in 1996 and then in 2007 for Cyrano de Bergerac. But Lacroix’s couture runways were always theater productions in and of themselves. Blending a myriad of historical and cultural references, he proposed fashion that warped the concepts of time and space. There was his spring 1994 show that mixed and matched the Directoire fashion of the French Revolution with the style of the 1940s, and a spring 1988 collection that referenced his birthplace of Arles together with 18th century French fashions.
This new exhibition showcases over 40 costumes chosen from the 100-plus that Lacroix created for Peer Gynt, and inaugurates SCAD’s new facilities for SCAD FASH, which now encompasses two buildings in the medieval village of Lacoste.
Why focus on his work in costume and not haute couture? “I lost my name and I lost my archive, it wasn’t possible to do an exhibition of haute couture,” said Lacroix. The designer’s business was sold by LVMH in 2005 to Falic Fashion Group after cumulative losses, and filed for bankruptcy in 2009—his last collection was privately funded by Lacroix himself, and shown for the fall 2009 couture season. This exhibition, nonetheless, offers insight into his legacy as a couturier in that it allows viewers to immerse themselves in the astounding beauty of his technical eye for making clothes.
Sprawling across two floors, the show includes video footage of the original presentation of the play and features selected sketches Lacroix made, digitally and by hand, for each character. The costumes were created by Lacroix with the use of the company’s archive, meaning that most of them utilize pieces that had been used in the past for other productions. It also includes a custom carpet created by the designer, a nod not only to the play’s plot, but also to Lacoste, as there’s a chateau similar to the Château du Marquis de Sade that is iconic to Lacoste and sits atop its highest peak.
The exhibition showcases the beauty of Lacroix’s work and his talent for blending multiple references. But above all, it has something to teach us about how fashion should operate moving forward, from the importance of research, to the value of designing for “real people,” to the necessity of a sustainable mindset. Read on for a masterclass from Christian Lacroix and Olivier Saillard.
On Research and Culture
Christian Lacroix: No designer can compete with ethnic costumes. There are beautiful things to research and learn, because cultures used to do such beautiful things when you look back. This play mixes Africa and Norway and more here, and it was all from research on ethnic costume to create something new.
Nowadays you have so many books about anything, but in the late ’50s and early ’60s I had three books in French. And my favorite game was to have several little bags, one with gender, one with country, and another with numbers for years. So I would come up with something like an old baker in Poland in the 18th century, and my next step was to go to the library and research it. No internet, no nothing, so it was quite expensive. But I’m now on Instagram, and I don’t follow influencers, but people who post very rare movies or other things that I find interesting.
Olivier Saillard: You can look back. We need to forget this concept in fashion to think about tomorrow. Tomorrow is worse [laughs]. When you are doing costumes, you’re not always thinking about the future like you do in fashion. It’s important to suggest to students that you have to learn a little bit of everything, learn about history, culture, it’s important, and it doesn’t happen in the future. My favorites are these kinds of very traditional costumes that mix different cultures to create a completely new traditional costume. You can see Lacroix’s knowledge here.
I’ve probably done 250 or more exhibitions, not all very good [laughs]. But what I believe is that I want to learn something myself when I start an exhibition. If I’m not learning something, I suppose that visitors won’t be able to learn something either. I’m not very specialized with traditional costumes, so I learned here about all of the different pieces mixed together. Spain, North Africa, Norway. We need to consider something more than the clothes. With Lacroix, it’s a lesson in color, history of costume, sketching. Fashion shows during the ’50s took two hours, now it’s 10 minutes.
On Making the Old, New
Christian Lacroix: I hate spending money. I’m really not kidding [laughs]. Upcycling is wonderful, especially at the Comédie-Française where you have an archive of costumes to put on actors. We make the costumes based on the old, and alter or sometimes add something new. To put in the back of the actors’ mind that a costume was already worn by a famous—or less famous—actor from the past I think is interesting, and they have the challenge that they also have to create their own character.
On Dressing “Real People”
Olivier Saillard: Actors are real people and they have real bodies. It’s easy to dress an exhibition of couture because the model is the mannequin so you just zip and that’s it. Here you see the construction of different bodies, and how we had to make some mannequins slimmer or use pads to reconstruct the body. It’s important, because it represents what actors do, and how they can be big or small in the same way real people are. Maybe now fashion is becoming like that slowly.
On Adapting to Technology
Christian Lacroix: I started sketching on the computer, which was very new for me, since I used to do it all by hand and collage, but it’s like a drug. This way you can add photos and add the picture of the original costume or a textile or anything. I’m like a child, I love to play this way. It was good for me to adapt to the process. I keep learning.
On Fashion and Theater
Olivier Saillard: Fashion students are always thinking fashion, but there are many possibilities to create clothes other than fashion. I think this is a good opportunity to show them how we could create clothes in a different way. It’s a lesson to explain to students how you can build costumes with fashion. Yesterday, when I saw the exhibition, I realized how great it would be for a student to do a fashion show as a theater piece. There’s so many different ways to present fashion and clothes. I would love to see more. You know, Issey Miyake was one of the first designers to be interested in the fashion show, but also the exhibition. Late into the ’70s he would host exhibitions to explain what he was doing with fashion. I would love to see more of that. Or more theatricality that has disappeared from fashion.
Christian Lacroix: Theater is totally different from fashion. Fashion has to be seen from up close, and is not necessarily as noticeable from far. But theater has to be underlined. I don’t like discreet things [laughs] so I think that’s why I like theater. You have to be a little bit louder than in fashion, because the viewer has to have an idea of the character as soon as they enter on stage.
I think the couture designer, the true designer, is perhaps not so interested in theater. You are a costume designer or a fashion designer; I was in between both, and I was happy and I was lucky to start in the ’80s, because that was an era when everyone was in their own movie and everybody was playing their own role. That’s why I much preferred haute couture, because you’re dressing one woman. I had this customer, a beautiful woman who married a very rich English guy who had coal mines. Each month she wanted to visit her husband in the mine, and she wanted to be noticed and to be beautiful. Once I made her this coat in yellow, sporty enough for her to go. Back then you had customers asking for dresses to go to the dentist, they weren’t moving a lot [laughs]. There was also a young bride who wanted to be Alice in Wonderland, and there was the one who wanted to be a Botticelli. I liked it for that reason. But I think of someone Cristóbal Balenciaga, who I think is the best couturier ever, who was not interested in costume at all. He made clothes. A good example of the balance is Yves Saint Laurent, who I think was just the son of Balenciaga and Coco Chanel, but by himself he did wonderful, wonderful costumes. But he was not happy with his costumes. I’ll tell you that story another time.
“Christian Lacroix Habille Peer Gynt Pour la Comédie-Française” opened July 1st and runs through November 1st, 2013 at SCAD FASH in Lacoste, France.
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