OLIVIER SAILLARD on GASTON
As I remember it, my relationship with my father was characterised by an absence of memories, and then a state of conflict that divided us but never led to a categorical falling-out. As a result I rejected any form of legacy or teaching, which I never saw coming from him. Or maybe it was me who wasn’t receptive to the signals. My father, Gaston Saillard, was a taxi driver, an occupation my mother eventually took up as well. But while she felt a sense of escape at the wheel, my dad thought it was a dismal job to be driving around the streets day and night. More than a father figure, he was like a child, which was how he behaved as a member of our large family, where my mother asserted her authority. I was intent on strictly distancing myself from everything that might have reflected his existential choices (mainly resignation in his case), his habits or his daily life. That was until I reluctantly realised that I enjoyed taking his clothes. Not the garments he wore, but the ones of his past, from a time when I never knew him, before I was born. I adored his plaid shirts in shades of blue. I still wear one now. It has been washed so many times that the cotton has worn away to a diaphanous summery muslin. I loved to take the baggy, very 1940s suits of his youth and cobble together my own wardrobe inspired by the styles of Jean Paul Gaultier. Like him, I’ve never been a fan of suits worn as an ensemble. I prefer mismatched outfits, a bit scruffier rather than too smart. I always thought I had intentionally built my life in opposition to the very idea of my father, not by going towards him. Along the way this mindset had seemed more nourishing to me, not so official or lazy. Nowadays, with my soul more at peace, I love rediscovering him in a gesture, a hem, or in a jacket’s misshapen collar. As the years pass, I see us – him and me – united in that taste for derision and the derisory that he carried with the grace of obliviousness. (As told to Lella Scalia)
Olivier Saillard is is a pre-eminent fashion historian and curator; he’s also the artistic director at J.M. Weston.