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Essays

The Living Museum of Fashion A text by Olivier Saillard

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Released on March 6 / Available for pre-order for shipping from March 9


In 2026, Olivier Saillard took over the exhibition spaces of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain for several weeks with Le Musée vivant de la mode (“The Living Museum of Fashion”), an unprecedented program of exhibitions, installations, performances, and talks, through which he articulated a story of clothing and fashion in motion. Echoing the legacy of the Grands Magasins du Louvre—which occupied the Fondation Cartier building from 1887 to 1974 and where the first “ready-made dresses” were presented, heralding the advent of the garment and ready-to-wear industry—Saillard developed a sensitive and intimate vision of fashion, one that foregrounds everyday clothes, traditionally excluded from museum collections.In this text conceived as a manifesto, Olivier Saillard argues for the idea of a living museum of fashion which, unlike traditional museums that present fashion as static objects, restores life to garments through movement, gesture, and intimacy. Attentive to traces of lived experience and to the passage of time, he offers an ode to the worn garment—an ode to clothing shaped by use and presence.

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Editor Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris
Languages Bilingual French / English version
Format

Paperback, 17 × 10.5 cm, 56 pages
Non-illustrated

Design Nolwen Lauzanne
ISBN 9782869252141
Release March 2026

Olivier Saillard

Olivier Saillard is a French fashion historian. From 1995 to 2000, he served as Director of the Musée de la Mode in Marseille before becoming Head of Fashion Exhibition Programming at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In 2010, he was appointed Director of the Palais Galliera, the Fashion Museum of the City of Paris. He has been Director of the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa since 2017 and Artistic, Image, and Culture Director of the J.M. Weston house since 2018. He is the author of several books on fashion, including Le Bouquin de la Mode (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2019) and Une histoire de la mode (Paris: Bouquins, 2025). He also curated exhibitions such as Christian Lacroix : Histoire de vêtements (2007) at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Jeanne Lanvin (2015) and Azzedine Alaïa: Couturier and Collector (2023) at the Palais Galliera in Paris, Balenciaga: Couture in Black (2017) at the Musée Bourdelle in Paris, and The Ephemeral Museum of Fashion (2017) at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Italy. In 2005, Olivier Saillard was awarded a residency at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto. In parallel, he develops a poetic, reflective, and sensitive work through performances in which clothing, in its most intimate form, remains the central focus. Since 2023, he has regularly collaborated with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

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