Olivier Saillard: “Fashion has become a Cannes Film Festival organized in Las Vegas”

He himself notes the paradox: "I do a number of interviews, it's astonishing, it contradicts the era... In any luxury house, if we had said that we were going to release a book on mode of 1,200 pages, without images, the marketing committee would have said "it won't work"..." Yes, but here it is, the Bouquin de la mode, a collective work of academics and researchers coordinated by him, is erudite but accessible, literary without pedantry, in places light, even funny. Like Olivier Saillard.

Denim shirt buttoned up to the collar as usual, indigo pants that stop at the ankle, Weston on the feet, notorious affability slung over the shoulder: the historian, on occasion a performer, ex-director of the Palais Galliera, now artistic director of the JM Weston house and big boss of the Azzedine-Alaïa foundation, returns for Liberation to the genesis of this book and specifies the rather pessimistic inventory of fixtures that he draws up of current fashion.

The approach of this fashion book is quite literary…

As it was part of the Bouquins collection, I wanted us to work on it. There are a lot of fashion books, we often read them in the library, not in bed. I wanted people to be able to really read it, so that it wasn't just a knowledge tool. One can be interested in this theater of appearances, very romantic, and read it like a little play.

Is it an action against the "orchestrated amnesia" you speak of?

Yes. We have all the tools of a very efficient memory, much more than before, but we only talk about the memory that is failing, more compatible hard drives... We have confidence in memory tools that are sometimes faulty and can become obsolete, and while ours becomes random, we don't take care of it. A leaky name that we can't find, we google… Memory has been relocated.

What is important to remember when it comes to fashion?

The past. Young creators, or creators, would have a better job if they had, as in art history, responsibility for the past. You cannot do something that has already existed.

But fashion is just that, a perpetual recycling...

It is abusively. And it's very contradictory, a fashion that says it only looks to the future when it has never been so turned to the past. There is only vintage, vintage recycling, no new forms. In the past, there was Alaïa on this sculpture phenomenon, Jil Sander who focused on making beautiful jackets, an exploration of styles or expressions that I don't see there.

There are too many shows, creations, with good ideas but vandalized by a show time of seven minutes, a perpetual communication operation… Fashion has become a Cannes Festival organized in Las Vegas.

We don't leave the time to the creators anymore...

Fashion schools are a bit at fault. We teach creators to be immediately at the origin of a style, an idea. But fashion is still an apprenticeship. All the great fashion designers I have worked with have had a long apprenticeship period: Azzedine [Alaïa], it's twenty years of sewing in the living room, in the bedroom, Yohji [Yamamoto] learned a long time.

I find all these young designers who try to exist and fight against heavyweights like LVMH very meritorious. How do you manage to sell when you don't have a building in every city? It's very hard. The current situation reminds me a lot of the 1970s, a decade of great overproduction, very polyamide, very harmful, where we saw the limits of a system, a garish decade, which we began to readjust after the 2000s The coming years will see a small wave of minimalism and essentialism.

Are we coming to the end of a system?

It cracks everywhere.

Haute couture seems surreal, but isn't it ultimately the heart of the profession?

What I love about haute couture is that there's a more detached side to fashion, a bit more boring. But haute couture has missed an appointment, which is to say that tailor-made is not necessarily overpaid. I have my pants made, it costs me 250 euros, but that's haute couture too.

Custom-made would be a solution?

It could. When you do tailor-made, you don't throw away your clothes and you buy less, but what will really change things are the debates you see everywhere. There are sometimes propaganda statements: “We will create and produce better, but we will always produce as much.” Nope ! It takes less… In the 1970s, there was only one Chanel boutique in the world, on rue Cambon. Today there are several hundred. It is a general, recent phenomenon. Since the end of the 1990s, there has been a Herzog & de Meuron building for Prada, another Renzo Piano for Hermès, in each city. There was not only fashion, but also cities preempted by fashion. Now we have to feed them. And 70% of clothes are only sold on sale. What are we doing ? The leaders are not ready at all. All these “ethical committees”, eco-responsibility… It has a propaganda effect on me, there really is no morality. Three big bosses changed the face of fashion: Patrizio Bertelli of Prada, Bernard Arnault of LVMH, and François Pinault of Kering. How are they going to get out of this situation? But consumers are moving faster than the industry, they will push them out of this system.

What will we remember from the work of the most prominent fashion designers of the moment, Alessandro Michele at Gucci and Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga?

They make clothes that are themselves the sediments of other clothes. And it's a beautiful photo of the time. Between Hedi Slimane (Celine), Michele and Demna, in fact, that's how people dress the most: this kind of collective clothing unconscious. Everyone wears a man's shirt, a raincoat. It's more fun with Michele, a little more archetypal with Vetements or Balenciaga, but each time it's the same creative process: redoing what has been done. Time will date this. We can say that “that's very 2010”, that they are still different. That everything is oversize, but this oversize is theirs.

We ask creators to be on Instagram, in constant representation…

They are also at fault. They wanted to be omnipresent on all subjects, like the patriarch Hedi Slimane. Perhaps the couturiers should become couturiers again.

Margiela and Rei Kawakubo, two cult designers, are silent…

Yes, and the fact that John Galliano becomes better again is linked to his silence. We leave him alone. He didn't choose it at first, it was linked to this media fatwa , but I think it protected him. He is sheltered from the lights, he is not asked to be social, to be an artistic director on all subjects.

I've noticed two reassuring signs recently. That Virgil Abloh cracks, to begin with: we say to ourselves it's not normal [to be so active], we have to help him, that he be a little concentrated. Alaïa would have been furious, he would have said “If you have a job, that's all you do. Do your work !" And then there is the departure of Demna from Vetements: resigning from his own creation is an unprecedented fact in fashion. He will be better at doing only one thing. There is no pride in competing with Karl Lagerfeld. There have been too many bad collections.

You say that the parade is a worn-out concept…

The parade was two hours in the 50s, forty minutes in the 80s, twenty minutes in the 90s, seven minutes today. And we wait thirty minutes for that. And many people only take pictures, without really looking. That's why I don't go there anymore or very little.

Should cell phones be banned?

Yes. At the opera, no one takes photographs… Azzedine Alaïa forbade it. One day, I saw someone get kicked out of one of his fashion shows for that… In addition, you can immediately find all the photos on specialized sites. In fact, we photograph to post on social networks, to show that we are there at the same time.

What creator could reinvent the show?

Whoever comes to change the cards will not only do so stylistically, but rather on the method of production, distribution, demonstration. Everyone who mattered twisted the market and the system a bit. Azzedine refused, Martin Margiela did otherwise. But it's hard to say no. Azzedine had phenomenal lows from saying no, Martin stopped because it was becoming impossible… It's rare now for a long route, very rare.

What do you love about fashion today?

People in the street: I find them more elegant than what I see on parade, especially the girls. They have great ease in handling the old and the new, the cheap. And the boys also dress much better than before. Dressing up is no longer a sign of sexual deficiency, you're no longer a fag because you put on a pink shirt. And then we maintain our body, we have coaches… They are beautiful.

How do you explain the success of fashion exhibitions?

It coincided with the fall of magazines: the fewer readers there were, the more visitors there were. A fashion expo attracts on average 400,000, 500,000 or even 700,000 visitors, and it's not that expensive to produce. The general public asks to understand, it is thirsty for pedagogy. It is also in my eyes a form of failure of fashion: it is seen on a base, but it is no longer worn.