For nearly six decades, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac has defied easy definition, both on the runway and off. A proto-multi-hyphenate, he’s newly familiar to a younger generation for iconic pieces like the teddy bear coat (from fall 1988) sported by Drake a few years back. That, plus riffs on cartoons, pop culture, and fashion royalty—Superman, Snoopy, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, Lady Di, President Obama, Coco Chanel, Vivienne Westwood, and Sonia Rykiel are all here—converged last night in Toulouse in a preview followed by a private dinner celebrating Castelbajac’s first major “explosition.”
“Imagination au Pouvoir” (“Imagination at Work”) is the headliner at Les Abattoirs, a former slaughterhouse now converted into one of France’s leading contemporary art museums, for an eight-month run. In addition to showcasing the designer’s best-known creations, it includes original works made by and with a constellation of boldfaced artists (Haring, Mapplethorpe, Basquiat). It also has a spiritual dimension, notably in the colorful vestments made for World Youth Day in 1985 and those designed for the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral, offering a kaleidoscopic take on the designer’s career and, in retrospect, his foresight.
Just don’t call it a retrospective. “Those are for the past,” he quipped. “I love things that are understood in the future.” Staged by the 76-year-old designer in collaboration with curator Pascal Rodriguez, the exhibition features some 300 pieces, from early experiments in upcycling, streetwear, and high-performance sportswear to art, social commentary, and politics.
The museum chose Castelbajac, whose family tree has been rooted in this region for a millennium, for its first-ever fashion exhibition in part because he refuses to be pigeonholed, said Lauriane Gricourt, director of Les Abbatoirs.
“He’s an artist who hasn’t benefitted from enough visibility, be it in fashion or art,” she told Vogue. “People tend to know him for a specific item, without having a grasp of the whole, which is quite singular and very rich. His work is rather astonishing, and his reflections are expressed through a non-traditional medium, which is fashion. What’s really interesting is to have the discourse of an art historian filtered through a fashion designer.”
Even fashion lovers may know that, from the time he was old enough to build chateaux out of whatever was at hand, Castelbajac found in creativity a refuge from a far more challenging childhood than his aristocratic name might suggest. At 17, with the help of his seamstress mother, he began making “wearable houses” out of humble materials, like a blanket filched from military boarding school, mop rags, or medical gauze. By the mid-1970s, he was immersed in the New York art scene, a chapter that informed his collections for decades to follow.