The Museum of Fashion on display

RATP (Paris Transport Authority) and the Fondation Cartier are partnering to present a series of artistic projects in the galerie Valois.

While performances and a living museum are invented within the Fondation Cartier, Olivier Saillard is deploying a Musée de la Mode en Vitrine in the antique wood-paneled display cases of the Galerie Valois, an arcade located in a passageway of the Palais-Royal underground station, which once connected the underground to the Grand Magasins du Louvre department store, where the beginnings of clothing industrialisation took place.

This overview of the Fashion Museum questions the way clothing and fashion are usually presented in museums. Each display case thus challenges a conventional approach where fashion is reduced to silence and immobility: static mannequins, garments exhibited as objects and closed display cases evoke the disappearance of fashions and their ephemeral nature. A suitcase, nomadic argument for a pocket museum, wax mannequins, posed as visitors to an exhibition in which they themselves are the visible works, offer an alternative to official museum practices.