FRANCE: An exhibition at Les Arts Decoratifs museum marks Christian Lacroix's twenty years in fashion

Record ID: 782085

  • Title: FRANCE: An exhibition at Les Arts Decoratifs museum marks Christian Lacroix's twenty years in fashion
  • Date: 12th November 2007
  • Summary: (SOUNDBITE) (French) MARJORIE ALESSANDRINI, EDITOR SAYING : "I think that it is an amazing exhibition. Christian Lacroix spoke about it for a long time. I had the opportunity to interview him several times and he spoke about it for the last six or eight months. I think that it was a real pleasure for him to dive in his stock and take out beautiful clothes". POSTER READING "ABIME A L'ENVERS" PINK JACKET WITH BEIGE SKIRT IN LACE AND SATIN MANNEQUIN WITH BLACK AND BEIGE HAT WITH VEIL/PALE PINK TOP IN MUSLIM WITH WHITE DOTS MARIE-ANTOINETTE STYLE GOWN
  • Embargoed: 27th November 2007 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: France
  • Country: France
  • Topics: Fashion
  • Reuters ID: LVAALVGQAI11WZO950UV9F5230R4
  • Story Text: An exhibition at Les Arts Decoratifs museum marks Christian Lacroix's twenty years in fashion combining his own creations with a selection of the museum's collection.
    French couture designer Christian Lacroix drew on his long interest in the history of fashion to create an exhibition at the main design museum in Paris showing that little is new in the world of clothes.
    The exhibition at Les Arts decoratifs museum, which opens to the public on Thursday (November 8) and runs to April 20, marks Lacroix's 20 years in fashion and makes clear the debt he owes to the past.
    "My work is not a work of a fashion revolutionary, it is a work of great respect, of great fascination for everything that preceded us and my work would not exist without the museums. In fact, I'm not someone who worked on futurism but on nostalgia, on the history and who since my childhood was fascinated by this kind of collections. So, today it's like an adult who fulfils a dream or a project's child.It's very satisfactory," he told Reuters at the press launch on Wednesday (November 7).
    Les Arts decoratifs, reopened in 2006 after years of neglect groups art and design from fashion, decoration and advertising. The exhibition displays creations of Lacroix's alongside hundreds of items he picked out from the museum's own collection of gowns and robes from the 18th century to the 1930s.
    Chosen according to themes like colour or technique, there are sections on the use of white or tartan, favoured textures like patchwork or distressed materials or themes such as "Hispanism" or "Liturgy".
    Lacroix said that normally in big exhibitions, there is no room for anonymous pieces of clothing. He stressed that he wanted to show pieces from the old times.
    But Lacroix, hardly the only fashion designer to plunder the past for inspiration, stressed he wanted to avoid creating a forbidding impression of design history.
    "Art is not always the pyramids, Napoleon or the big things, what I like is the street, ordinary things, daily life. So, in this museum, in this exhibition, if there is a little bit of a sensation when the girls were walking in the street, if there is a little bit of charm, of glamour, everything you think of from the past centuries, and we look at them just like if they were walking in today's life, then I would be happy", he said.
    Lacroix's work is often associated with a bold and even extravagant use of colours like red and yellow. But he has always had a deep interest in the history of art and design, since his childhood in the ancient southern town of Arles and he had originally hoped to be a museum curator after studying the history of art at university.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2011. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
  • Usage Terms/Restrictions: None
Register