PARIS — “Museums can feel a little dead.”

So says Olivier Saillard, who for seven years was director of Palais Galliera, the Paris fashion museum, and has curated numerous exhibitions for other institutions.

The fashion historian has long mulled the strangeness of showing clothes absent their original owners. 

“I’ve always thought of fashion museums as places for remains — almost morbid in a way,” he said. “There’s something about them that feels linked to death. They’re museums of missing men and women, and that’s a striking realization when you work there.”

So when the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris offered him a two-week residency, Saillard dubbed it “Le Musée Vivant de la Mode” — “The Living Museum of Fashion” in English.

Instead of static displays, he plans to show clothes on models via daily live presentations. On the weekends, he will stage one-off performances with his longtime collaborator, British actress Tilda Swinton, and jewelry designer Paloma Picasso, marking their first joint project.

“I was hesitant to do this at first, but at a certain point, I sat down and asked myself, ‘What is it you really want?’ I’m turning 60, I’ve done more than 250 exhibitions, I’ve done performances. I closed my eyes and thought, ‘I want to invent my own living museum of fashion,’” he recalled. 

“It’s the museum of fashion gestures and movement, but also in a way, the museum of the living — meaning those who are alive,” he added.

That’s why, instead of showcasing the kind of haute couture gowns beyond the reach of mere mortals, Saillard wanted to exalt ordinary clothes — including some with extraordinary owners. 

Guardians of Memory

He borrowed items from the personal wardrobes of designers — Helmut Lang’s hole-ridden T-shirt, Christian Lacroix’s patchwork jacket from the ‘90s or Azzedine Alaïa’s uniform of black Chinese tunic and pants among them.

They will be shown alongside workwear garments and designer clothes that are beyond repair, and would be confined to the vaults in a traditional fashion museum. “I even have clothes I found in the street,” Saillard said. 

The garments will be attached to beige linen dresses worn by nine models, like mobile canvases. Saillard himself will present the performances, which run Wednesdays through Sundays at 5 p.m., beginning Sunday to March 21.

“Whether there are five people or 50, I’ll be on hand to walk them through it,” he said.

Models will read texts by the likes of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who wrote about fashion under the pen name Miss Satin; perform little choreographies, and show off the designs.

“We’ll go from a poem to a gesture, to a workwear jacket, to Helmut Lang’s clothes, to a threadbare dress by Madame Grès – things that simply breathe poetry and life,” Saillard said.

A longtime fan of vintage fashion, he’s bought damaged dresses by the likes of Jeanne Lanvin and Cristóbal Balenciaga to save them from oblivion. 

“I’ve always found it a shame that in an archeology museum, there are fragments and ceramic shards — and it’s no big deal that something is missing — but fashion won’t allow that. So I gave myself the right to show very damaged things, like a symbol of the fleeting nature of fashion,” he said. 

“This project is about honoring all the lost, mended, discarded and forgotten garments — those everyday items that are overlooked,” he added.

To celebrate those unsung heroes, Saillard tapped Erdal Pinarci, a master tailor who has been with Alaïa since 1996, to piece together a tailored jacket in the style of Alaïa or Christian Dior, using scraps from used workwear pants. He also had a dress made from dozens of handkerchiefs embroidered with women’s first names.

Department Store Roots

For his performance with Picasso, Saillard will explore how her personal style inspired Yves Saint Laurent’s spring 1971 collection, which the historian credits with popularizing vintage fashion. Their talk will unfold against the backdrop of the designer’s sketches. 

“She is very impressive,” Saillard said. “She’s managed to carve her own path despite the weight of her family heritage. In fact, she explains that wearing ‘40s clothes in the early ‘70s, when everyone was doing the opposite, was her way of blazing her own trail.”

His performance with Swinton promises to be more conceptual, as it’s an exploration of the role and aesthetics of window display mannequins. Saillard, who is director of the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, has made copies of a Madeleine Vionnet dress from its collection. 

“While I put the ‘facsimile’ dresses on wood and plaster mannequins from different eras, someone will try them on [Tilda] to see who is more alive. We want to show the paradox that sometimes a living body can be completely absent,” he explained.  

The location has a special resonance. Fondation Cartier’s new headquarters in the Palais-Royal district, inaugurated last October, used to house the Grands Magasins du Louvre department store. 

While researching his latest book, “A History of Fashion,” published in French by Bouquins Editions, Saillard found out that the store was the first to sell “ready-made” dresses in the 19th century, marking the birth of a more democratic approach to dressing. 

“For the first time in a store, there were not just bolts of fabric, but matching tops and skirts,” he said. “That doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it was a revolution in fashion and it’s a little-known fact.”

In a nod to that history, he’s taking over the antique wood-paneled display cases of the Galerie Valois, an arcade located in a passageway that once connected the Palais Royal — Musée du Louvre underground station to the department store.  

“I like the idea that’s inside the subway station. It’s free and it’s an allegory of a fashion museum behind glass,” Saillard said.