Christian Lacroix: No designer can compete with ethnic wear. There are so many beautiful things to study and learn because when you look back, culture has done such beautiful things. The show is a fusion of Africa and Norway and more, all created through the study of national costumes.
Now you have a lot of books about anything but in I have three books in French in the late 10’s and early 10’s. My favorite game has little bags, one with gender, one with country, and another with year numbers. So I’m going to come up with something like the old baker in 10 Century Poland, my next step is to go to the library and research it. No internet, nothing, so pretty expensive. But I’m on Instagram now, and I’m not following 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 will be worse [laughs]. When you make clothes, you don’t always think about the future the way fashion does. It is important to suggest to students that you learn a little bit of everything, understand history, culture, it is important, and this will not happen in the future. My favorites are these very traditional outfits that mix different cultures to create a whole new traditional look. You can see Lacroix lore here.
I probably did 250 shows or more, and not all of them were great [laughs]. But I believe that when I started putting on an exhibition, I wanted to learn something myself. If I don’t learn something, I don’t think the visitor can learn something either. I’m not very good at traditional clothes, so I learned about all the different outfits mixed together here. Spain, North Africa, Norway. We need to think about more than clothes. For Lacroix, it was a class on colour, clothing history and drawing. The fashion show in the era took two hours, but now it only takes minutes.
On breaking the old and establishing the new 250
Christian Lacroix: Theater is totally different from fashion. Fashion needs to be seen at close range, and it is not necessarily so eye-catching from a distance. But the drama must be emphasized. I don’t like cautious things [laughs] so I guess that’s why I like drama. You have to be a little louder than fashion because the audience has to have an idea of the character as soon as they get on stage.
