Olivier Saillard: the man disrupting the fashion industry

So, after all these years watching from the sidelines, why enter the fray now? ‘To change!’ Saillard says, blue eyes twinkling behind his wire-frame glasses. ‘When you are 50 years old, you suddenly want to change everything. In more than 20 years as a museum director, I’ve done over 140 exhibitions. I was very lucky to grow up [admiring] these great designers — Azzedine Alaïa, Christian Lacroix, Martin Margiela — but there is no one left that I would like to curate an exhibition for. I must confess I’m not very excited by Virgil Abloh or Simon Jacquemus. But maybe I’m just getting old…’

However, if Moda Povera was born out of frustration with fashion present, it’s still very much rooted in fashion past. Saillard enlisted models and dressmakers who worked personally with the late, great French couturier Madame Grès to assist him in mimicking her iconic draping techniques. ‘The idea was to take something very ordinary — cheap T-shirts bought on the internet — and prove it could still be placed in the [realm] of couture,’ he explains. ‘I had only ever made performances or exhibitions, so to make something physical and visible with my own hands was very exciting. Very…’ He opts again for the French, ‘Rassurant’.

So reassuring was this first foray into design that Saillard is already sketching plans for a second. ‘I want to do something else inspired by ordinary, banal clothes — making them more sophisticated.’ This obsession with ‘humble’ garments extends into his work at JM Weston, too. He leaps up enthusiastically to explain the sprawling mood board he’s created for the brand’s 2019 women’s collection: a chaotic collage of obscure poets, ancient film posters and lumpen, clay-covered farm boots. ‘I’m very inspired by agricultural work footwear at the moment,’ he grins.

Clearly, Saillard is a man for whom one project is never enough. As well as splitting his week between JM Weston’s 16th arrondissement HQ and his own atelier on Rue des Petits-Champs, he’s also writing a book about the history of Western fashion, plotting a new show with Swinton (‘I want her to improvise with Pasolini’s [film] costumes’) and working on a men’s style event for Italian cultural collective Pitti Immagine (‘I’d love to do an exhibition [attended by] just one person at a time… But maybe that’s a dream!’)

How on earth does he balance all his commitments? ‘It’s very fluid,’ he shrugs. ‘For more than 20 years I was spending every day inside a museum. Now I enjoy wearing all these different hats. I feel very free.’

Saillard was born in 1967 in the tiny French town of Pontarlier. The son of taxi driver parents (yes, both of them) and the youngest of six siblings, as a fashion-mad boy he was already out of the ordinary. By age 12, the Greta Garbo-obsessed schoolboy was producing his own rudimentary style magazine, complete with fictionalised ‘correspondents’ (‘All named Olivier; not very humble,’ he says, laughing). After completing a master’s in art history at Montpellier University, he was installed as director at Marseille’s Musée de la Mode, aged 27. There, his penchant for outside-the-box-thinking quickly incurred the wrath of the museum’s president — and one of his all-time heroes — the late, legendary Tunisian couturier Azzedine Alaïa.

‘Azzedine was always shouting at me,’ Saillard says. ‘He didn’t agree with my ideas at first.’ It wouldn’t be the last time Saillard’s boundary-pushing would irk his colleagues (his Palais Galliera co-curators were ‘very against’ him handing Napoleon’s sacred garments to an actress), but the animosity soon dissolved, and he and Alaïa became firm friends. Today, along with his critically adored 2011 Madame Grès exhibition, Saillard cites his 2014 Alaïa retrospective as the finest moment of his career. ‘For me, Azzedine was the most important couturier of his time [Alaïa died last year]. I would watch him cutting and stitching a sleeve. He was like an author, weaving a story into the dress.’

The passion and eloquence with which Saillard speaks about fashion goes some way to explaining why his shows are so unorthodox. For him, you feel, the works of Alaïa or Madame Grès are more than just clothes — they’re poems, statements, historical artefacts — and deserve to be displayed as excitingly and flamboyantly as possible. ‘Even now I am designing, I see it like another form of exhibition,’ he says. ‘The Moda Povera collection is also a tribute to Madame Grès, a lesson about the history of couture.’

For Saillard, downtime is rare. Any he gets is spent at home in the first arrondissement with his fashion archivist partner Gael and their two cats. And while he cites Jean Paul Gaultier and Christian Lacroix as close friends (‘We spend Christmas Days with Christian’), you’re unlikely to spot him at Paris’s hippest parties. ‘I don’t get invited!’ he erupts in mock fury. As the interview draws to a close, I ask if he’s concerned about the current state of luxury — how quickly new designers can be chewed up and spat out. He’s characteristically optimistic. ‘It’s very difficult to stay [relevant] for 20 years or more, but I’m convinced that, for new designers, the first 10 years are the most beautiful.’

If Moda Povera is anything to go by, the next decade could be very exciting indeed.