Amidst the myriad runway shows currently playing out in Paris, there’s only one place where people can go and find Comme des Garçons, Chanel, Marine Serre, Thebe Magugu, Yohji Yamamoto, Coco Chanel and Kevin Germanier plus 10 other visionary designers as a single experience. Sensitively staged by the revered French fashion journalist and author Laurence Benaïm, La traverse des apparences (Bridging Appearances) at the Centre Pompidou proposes captivating fashion juxtapositions throughout the museum’s fifth floor permanent collections.
Her carte blanche curation begins with what looks like a blank canvas crumpled into a sculpture. Except that it is actually look 7 from Viktor & Rolf’s fall 2015 haute couture collection, which they called “Wearable Art.” This is Benhaïm introducing the double notion of the canvas (a toile in French refers to both the artist’s canvas and the original pattern for making a garment): “In art and in fashion, the idea of the blank page,” she said during a recent walkthrough. “The idea is to show that, at a time when artists are becoming brands, and at a time when fashion brands are being reduced to logos, I wanted to show that you can express an identity without a logo.”
Wander from one gallery to the next and discover a striking silhouette adjacent to a major modern artwork: a trompe l’oeil sheath from Martin Margiela beside an uncanny Giorgio de Chirico painting, Il Ritornante, or a stunning form-meets-function pairing of Azzedine Alaïa’s legendary zipper dress in the presence of Marcel Breuer’s black leather and tubular steel furniture from 1926.
Benhaïm let the art shape her fashion selection (designs from Schiaparelli, Rabanne and Pierre Cardin were part of the original wish list). “I felt like I was watching a fashion show, but with artworks. And it was the artworks that made me think of dresses that could have been their friends. It’s like an encounter,” she said.
In some ways, the presentation picks up from the ambitious Saint Laurent exhibition from 2022 where highlights from his canon appeared alongside artworks at five of the city’s major institutions (including the Centre Pompidou). But Benaïm has taken a more nuanced approach to the pairings. Where she could have done the obvious Romanian Blouse that directly inspired the couturier, she chose a gauzy, black haute couture ensemble overlaid with Claude Lalanne’s sculpted nude torso in gold to go with a soft depiction of nude bodies within a landscape. The idea was to evoke movement and freedom, she explained. “Saint Laurent wanted to represent the beauty of the nude in these clothes, and Matisse dressed them in the nude. So it’s a kind of correspondence, a conversation. On the one hand, Saint Laurent was a great admirer of Matisse, and on the other, they both saw the same thing: they saw beauty.”