Olivier Saillard, who previously curated the inaugural exhibition of ITS Arcademy, "The First Exhibition - 20 Years of Contemporary Fashion Evolution", is an art historian and one of the world’s foremost fashion curators. Director of the Azzedine Alaïa Foundation, and former director of the Palais Galliera museum in Paris, his exhibitions and shows redefine convention and offer a fresh perspective on design while bridging the gap between fashion and artistic performance.

 

Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher, an associate professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He has been a Visiting Professor at universities including Buenos Aires, Columbia NY, Harvard, Monaco, Venice, Tokyo, and Weimar. Among his notable books are "Metamorphosis” (2021), "The Life of Plants” (2018) and “Philosophy of the Home" (2023).

 

Whether we wear them as protection or as an expression of our personality, clothes live countless lives. Each garment tells the story of the body that inhabits it, and every wardrobe is first and foremost a personal archive, a sort of museum. In this exhibition, designer clothes from the ITS Arcademy Collection alternate with everyday garments with strong emotional impact, some borrowed from famous international fashion museums, such as those worn by actresses Tilda Swinton and Charlotte Rampling.

 

Clothes and museums share much more than we imagine: both are devices for exhibiting bodies that change meaning, status, and aura within them. This physical and metaphysical proximity means that the presence of each garment transforms a place into an exercise of exploration about what a museum space really is. From the domestic wardrobe to the abandoned garment, from the shop window to the dressing room, from the fashion show to the written page, fashion is the multiplication of our faces but also of the forms of art that are exhibition and staging.

 

Throughout his life, Olivier Saillard has catalogued the thousand shapes of this eternal museum of fashion. This exhibition is both a tribute to his curatorial practice and an inventory of situations in which the garment is no longer preceded by the body, but follows it in its existence before and after the exhibition, when the museum no longer considers it as a document or work of art. In each of these 12 stations, a garment becomes the coincidence of exhibition, museum, and visitor, all in the same body.

 

During your visit you will notice that the exhibition also features a number of mannequins positioned around the stations, dressed in creations preserved by ITS Arcademy. These mannequins deliberately mimic the situations, posture, and gestures of the exhibition's visitors, so much so that the visitors themselves, in flesh and blood, appear as their doppelgangers. With their backs bent to read a label at the bottom of a podium or their heads raised to get a better view of the artwork they are admiring, the visitors form an exhibition within the exhibition. Their appearance and the clothes they wear, all indistinguishably, are the living spectacle of an exhibition in progress, seen and watched. Could the real artwork to behold perhaps be those living shoulders moving through the museum, and not the just the ones standing on official and authoritative pedestals?

 

Let’s begin.