Fashion, Opera – And Now Museums: Christian Lacroix’s Thir

‘The Rose Empire’ exhibition at Louvre Lens in 2018

If that sounds crazy, it has a turn-out-your-attic fascination. These objects, displayed in the Papal Chapel, with its soaring ceiling and priestly windows, all seem to be entirely separate items in which the curator, and especially Lacroix, have found links.

‘Karl saw that my fashion was very, very theatrical and told me, “This isn’t really fashion – the patterns and the colours are all for the theatre,” then sending me off with lots of introductory letters,’ said Lacroix.

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Palais des Papes

And far from seeing his job as imposing order onto this cabinet of curiosities, Lacroix cherished the opportunity to make a historical ‘mix-and-match’.

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‘Since the dawn of time, we have been looking for and collecting the most remarkable objects – the most astonishing, the strangest, jealously preserved or generously given,’ the designer continued. ‘My aesthetic tastes drew me towards the unclassifable, the strange, the baroque and the extravagant – just as much as I was drawn to the removable and the extraordinary.’

And the glasses? Dug from a field around 1810, the Gallic-Roman object was probably made for a soldier as a primitive lucky charm.

‘Mirabilis’ read the colourful exhibition posters all over this once Papal city, where the towering stone buildings draw wonder and awe.

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‘The Rose Empire’ exhibition at Louvre Lens in 2018

Palais des Papes

The exhibition looks like a mad, and sometimes magical, mix of objects which were mostly chosen originally as informative: bones of a dinosaur; winged butterflies; the mummies from ancient Egyptian sarcophagi – and so much more.

‘As for ‘Mirabilis’ – I am happy to invite people to rediscover the richness of our museum collections unveiled in this cabinet of curiosity – really miraculous!’ she said.

So maybe this surprising and fascinating display in Avignon is not so very far from Lacroix’s previous life in fashion. And perhaps he likes it that way.

Whether it was the eyes of Lacroix or the curatorship of the five museums which brought these apparently disparate works together, it struck me that this kind of pick-and-mix approach expresses much of that is happening in fashion today: the deliberately offbeat colours, details taken from other eras and mixing 1980s shoulders with new-millennium materials.

Palais des Papes

A selection from 'the cabinet of curiosities' assembled in Christian Lacroix's 'Mirabilis' exhibition at Palais des Papes, Avignon

Courtesy of Palais des Papes

Gregory Guittard

‘The Rose Empire’ exhibition at Louvre Lens in 2018

Courtesy of Louvre Lens

Palais des Papes

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Karl was the genius,’ said Christian Lacroix, three decades after he had graduated from the Ecole du Louvre to begin his career.

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Courtesy of Louvre Lens

Add animal bones, carved horses, stuffed birds, paintings of religious figures – all divided into displays of different character by the five museums: Calvet, Lapidaire, Petit Palais, Requien and Roure.

By contrast, the central image for the show looks jokey: a sculpture in stone of the head of a man wearing a pair of black glasses. This figure is surrounded by a crazy mix of a wing-spread butterfly collection, Turkish Iznik pottery; a 19th-century tricycle shaped as a horse; a painted bowl of fruit and images of praying nuns.

It might have been the content of an ancient attic jumbled together. And so it was! Except that the attics were plural: five city museums of Avignon, which have recently been banded together.

Fashion, Opera – And Now Museums: Christian Lacroix’s Third Life

Christian Lacroix (right) with the curator of the 'Mirabilis' exhibition, Pascale Picard (left), and Avignon mayor Cécile Helle (centre)

A painting from the Calvert museum which is part of Christian Lacroix's 'Mirabilis' exhibition in Avignon

A relic from the Calvert museum: a piece of the vertebra of Pope Innocent VI, part of the the 'Mirabilis' exhibition in Avignon

‘Curiosity, far from being unwise, is actually one of the rarest of qualities,’ he claims. ‘It means the desire to learn and to know, to take a closer look at the most unusual, the rarest, and the most precious things that the world, nature and life have been capable of producing.