The power of imagination

Proclaiming the power of imagination, the exhibition highlights the various dimensions of a body of work that began in the late 1960s and continues to this day. Jean-Charles de Castelbajac’s immersive thematic tour, punctuated by installations created especially for Les Abattoirs, takes visitors on an almost initiatory journey into his world. The use of so-called “poor” materials – upcycling – accumulation, collage and hybridization are all gestures and experiments that play on the back-and-forth between fashion and art, resonating with the research of major art-historical movements such as Arte Povera, Nouveau Réalisme and conceptual art. Clothes, drawings, photographs, design objects and accessories reveal his ability to transform materials and ideas, offering a space for artistic, historical and societal reflection – total art, in short.

Art and fashion are one and the same for Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. Robert Malaval, Keith Haring, Cindy Sherman, Bettina Rheims, Robert Mapplethorpe, Olivero Toscani and Lady Gaga, to name but a few, rub shoulders with André Courrèges, Max Mara, Ligne Roset and liturgical commissions for World Youth Day and the reopening of Notre Dame de Paris. These encounters with his “contemporaries”, some of which are re-enacted in this exhibition, are a manifesto of the joyful virtuosity of an artist who never ceases to reinvent himself. It is this ability to imagine another idea of fashion that is at the heart of this exhibition, the first dedicated to this medium at Les Abattoirs.