Olivier Saillard Fashions Couture One-Offs From Mass-Market Suits, Shirts, and Tees

It seems, however, that Saillard, the former curator of Paris’s Palais Galliera, who is currently working with Fondation Azzedine Alaïa on that institution’s impressive exhibition program (showcasing not only the late designer’s work but also Alaïa’s breathtaking collection of historic fashion), was selling himself short. His astoundingly imaginative Moda Povera collections, which are built around the idea of repurposing inexpensive pieces of clothing—over-scale cotton t-shirts found on the internet, for instance, or men’s white shirts—with couture workmanship, prove that Saillard is no fashion dilettante.

This season he sleuthed a collection of low-priced size 8XL (that is size 70) men’s suits from the mass market retailer Kiabi in black synthetic fiber (jackets originally priced at $45, pants at $25). With the help of Martine Lenoir, a former dressmaker at the couture house of the legendary Madame Grès (whose work Saillard presented in a powerful monographic exhibition at the Musée Bourdelle in 2011), and a tailor who once worked with no less a figure than Cristobal Balenciaga himself (the designer whom even Christian Dior acknowledged was “the master of us all”), as well as muse Axelle Doué, the ’80s star runway model who also worked with Madame Grès, the pieces were miraculously transformed into superbly fashioned haute couture constructions. “Twisted and modified,” Saillard has written of the interventions that he wrought on these banal suits, they “become objects of reflection where one can read the history of fashion as if they are poems in homage to all the masters I have studied or admired.”