Moda povera V – Les vêtements de Renée

Following the evocative performance Embodying Pasolini with Tilda Swinton, staged in 2022, fashion historian and curator Olivier Saillard returns to Solomeo with his new work Moda Povera V – Les vetements de Renée, one of the most engaging chapters of his Moda Povera project initiated in 2018 and dedicated to his mother Renée.

“Renée passed away two years ago. Her clothes remained orphaned within a wardrobe for many months. Although this assembly of inert bodies could have been given away, or dispersed, it was decided to safeguard all these voiceless individuals, but with a soul. It is not that they were precious, luxurious or made of noble materials, quite the contrary. Renée had only few, well-chosen garments; she had shopped at the department stores in the industrial area ever since the shops in the town center had gone out of business, one by one. Precisely because they are modest and humble clothes, her form of aristocracy emerges from the care with which she kept them. Even their wear over time becomes a sort of embroidery. Out of the catalog of emotions that these garments represent, a unique collection was born. All of Renée’s clothes have been altered using the techniques of haute couture, along with the skills and the history of fashion that we love to recall through the creations in our cultural undertaking Moda Povera.”

Olivier Saillard