“I Was a Fashion Designer by Accident”—Christian Lacroix Celebrates a New Exhibition of His Costumes at SCAD Lacoste

Nowadays you have so many books about anything, but in the late ’50s and early ’60s I had three books in French. And my favorite game was to have several little bags, one with gender, one with country, and another with numbers for years. So I would come up with something like an old baker in Poland in the 18th century, and my next step was to go to the library and research it. No internet, no nothing, so it was quite expensive. But I’m now on Instagram, and I don’t follow influencers, but people who post very rare movies or other things that I find interesting. 

Olivier Saillard: You can look back. We need to forget this concept in fashion to think about tomorrow. Tomorrow is worse [laughs]. When you are doing costumes, you’re not always thinking about the future like you do in fashion. It’s important to suggest to students that you have to learn a little bit of everything, learn about history, culture, it’s important, and it doesn’t happen in the future. My favorites are these kinds of very traditional costumes that mix different cultures to create a completely new traditional costume. You can see Lacroix’s knowledge here.

I’ve probably done 250 or more exhibitions, not all very good [laughs]. But what I believe is that I want to learn something myself when I start an exhibition. If I’m not learning something, I suppose that visitors won’t be able to learn something either. I’m not very specialized with traditional costumes, so I learned here about all of the different pieces mixed together. Spain, North Africa, Norway. We need to consider something more than the clothes. With Lacroix, it’s a lesson in color, history of costume, sketching. Fashion shows during the ’50s took two hours, now it’s 10 minutes. 

On Making the Old, New