The Tamesis
Among them are fashion fans, including Jean-Denis Franoux. Franoux, a long-time fashion professor at Studio Berçot and designer from 1994 to 2001, started collecting perfume bottles as a child and later became obsessed with clothes. He studied fashion in Paris in 1990, spent his spare francs in Puces, and then became a fan of eBay and real-life auctions, decades before antique hunting became a favorite pastime of fashionistas. This is how he selected several pieces from the foundational collections of John Galliano, Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, Martin Margiela and Jean Paul Gaultier, plus countless treasures from Madeleine Vionnet, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, Madame Grès, Jeanne Lanvin and others, collecting them not out of whim or guesswork, but out of a persistent need to understand the why and how of shapes.
Today, Franus, 56, has a collection of 25,000 pieces and counting. His latest creations include a modest yet gorgeous Balenciaga couture gown from the winter of 1938, in near-mint condition with zigzag seams, slightly piled shoulders and rounded sleeves, resurfaced at Vinted in Spain. The other is more than 400 original Vionnet prints that have been preserved since the designer closed her house in 1939. “To me, they’re like time machines,” he said. He noted that he purchased the shipment for his students and to prevent it from falling into the hands of counterfeiters.
This collective achievement, called “Regarderobes” (the name is a combination of the words “look” and “wardrobes”), will be presented for the first time at an invitation-only event taking place in a private space in the Haute-Marais district from tonight until Saturday. The collection is now structured as an endowment, legally prohibited from sale or distribution, and will be made available to schools and other institutions. For his curatorial debut, Franoux carefully selected around 150 works, including 50 complete looks, ranging from Galliano, Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons in the mid-1980s to the 1930s (Hermès, Schiaparelli), the 1940s/60s (Balenciaga, Balmain) and the 70s/90s (Chloé, Gaultier, Margiela).
A few days before the opening, he welcomed Fashion Arriving at his apartment/storage room/makeshift photo studio in Paris, hundreds of objects line the shelves, while others are stacked in floor-to-ceiling boxes, awaiting their close-ups (in the meantime, most of his treasures are biding their time in a storage facility near his hometown of Epinal in eastern France). In a wide-ranging conversation, Frannoux discussed the unexpected parallels between perfume and fashion, the “Frankenstein factor,” and why he decided to create an endowment rather than cash out or donate it all to a museum. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
