In a New Performance Piece, Tilda Swinton Turns Fashion Into Art (from T Magazine NYT)

The actress Tilda Swinton has for several years collaborated with Olivier Saillard, the director of Paris’s Palais Galliera fashion museum, on an annual performance for that city’s Festival d’Automne. In 2013, they did “Eternity Dress,” in which a garment was tailor-made — from measuring and patterning to cutting and sewing — for the actress before a live audience. The year prior, Saillard and Swinton created a piece called “The Impossible Wardrobe,” in which Swinton walked a selection of beautiful, fragile historical garments from the Palais Galliera’s archives (Napoleon’s tailcoat, an ermine collar worn by Sarah Bernhardt) down a runway.

 This year, the two have produced a piece called “Cloakroom — Vestiaire Obligatoire,” which opens tomorrow and runs for a week at the Palais Galliera. The preview performance today was a veritable Paris Who’s Who; Alber Elbaz, Haider Ackermann, Martine Sitbon, Charlotte Rampling, Stella Tennant and Pierre Bergé were in attendance. Swinton took on the personae of the audience members by way of their outerwear: Spectators relinquished their coats and jackets to the actress, tentatively making their way to the wooden table that served as the “stage” threshold. Swinton laid each garment out, held it up, smoothed it out and contemplated it, sometimes crouching or lying atop it. Periods of silence alternated with ambient sounds by the “music stylists” Mode-F.

 

Every so often, Swinton added a keepsake to each coat: an envelope, scented, sealed and then slipped into a pocket; a hair plucked and placed on a lapel; a lipstick-blotted tissue snuck inside a motorcycle jacket. At the end, each owner reclaimed his or her item.

After the performance, Swinton described the nature of her collaboration with Saillard. “It’s built on a shared complicity and a shared determination to be playful,” she said. “Our idea this time was to have no structure at all…. We dared each other to be this sauvage. Who knows what will happen — it will be different every night.”

She continued: “In my view, possibly the most interesting thing about clothes is that people live in them. It’s the breath in them that actually attaches us to them.”