Historian, author, performer, exhibition curator and artistic director, Olivier Saillard transcends the boundaries between disciplines to create his own language of clothing and fashion. When we meet him, at the beginning of September, on the terrace of the Alaïa Foundation café, in the Marais, he has just returned from Taipei (Taiwan), where this summer he presented, together with the actress Tilda Swinton, his latest show, titled Embodying Pasolini, performed in Paris, in 2022, during the Autumn Festival. Olivier Saillard is used to putting on unique shows in which actresses and models dress in silence or carry him in their arms, for the most fragile ones.
Performances at the intersection of fashion show, exhibition and theater, created against the rhythms of fashion and its commercial system. Embodying Pasolini It marks the fourth collaboration between Olivier Saillard and Tilda Swinton, the international icon of arthouse cinema.
Uniquely, this show featured a selection of costumes designed by Danilo Donati and made by Atelier Farani for the films of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). Majestic, Tilda Swinton alternately wears antique togas and ecclesiastical chasubles, and wears impressive headdresses, such as the famous head ornament worn by actress Silvana Mangano in Oedipus the king (1967).
Accustomed to intimate venues, the duo performed in front of an audience of six hundred people at the Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC), as part of the Taipei Arts Festival. Tickets for all six nights of performances sold out in just five minutes. “Tilda is very well known in Asia. It was the first time we played in front of such a large audience, the atmosphere was more electric than usual. And then, the applause was so warm! “They gave us a standing ovation.” says enthusiastically Olivier Saillard, now director of the Alaïa Foundation, after many years at the helm of Palazzo Galliera, the Fashion Museum of the city of Paris.
Far from museum codes
Olivier Saillard has deeply rethought the way of presenting fashion, inventing animated and poetic exhibitions, far removed from the museum codes of the time. From the beginning he preferred to display clothes horizontally, sometimes even on the floor, rather than on Stockman mannequins, without protective glass, which creates a form of intimacy with the viewer. A tireless worker, Olivier Saillard has created thirty shows, some two hundred and fifty exhibitions and dozens of works on fashion and its history in more than twenty years.
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