“Mrs. Grace is never fashionable; she drives fashion” – her work opens at SCAD

Reluctantly retired. . Saillard met the designer at the end of his career, but said: “I’m not very enthusiastic about Mrs. In’ era, she was a vintage designer compared to Issey Miyake, Karl Lagerfeld or Yves Saint Laurent,” he said. In his then role at the Museum of Decorative Arts, the curator showed up on the fateful day of 1987 when the house was liquidated, where he collected costumes that otherwise would have been Doomed to go to the garbage heap. “That day,” Grace’s daughter Anne later said, “they stole her life.” (Annie then concealed her mother’s death in 1993 ; more than a year later, and a few months after a retrospective of Grès at the Costume Institute, the revelation was revealed.)

Saillard in 1937 was reintroduced to the designer as curator of the renovated Palais Galliera, where the curator dramatically presented Grès’s work. Since then, Saillard said, “I have always regarded Madame Grès as my angel; every moment I needed to do something, Madame Grace came. Now in Atlanta, she is with me.”