Tilda Swinton and Olivier Saillard are reinventing the fashion exhibition

Tilda Swinton is proposing pink lemonade in a navy silk Chanel two-piece from her dressing room at the Onassis Ready, a multimedia arts space in Athens. Her yellow-white hair is brushed back to reveal that extraordinary face. To her right sits one of her co-conspirators, the fashion curator, historian and director of Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, Olivier Saillard. For the past 14 years, the pair have created a series of highly original performances – often referred to as ‘living exhibitions' – in various museums and galleries. These thoughtful, thought-provoking acts seem conceived to unpick our collective fascination and often complex, multilayered relationships with clothing.

As a three-year-old, Swinton wore a white organza party dress. She vividly recalls in ‘The Biographical Wardrobe' – one of her and Saillard's most recent collaborations – the reaction this dress elicited in her elder brothers. ‘You look pretty…' they said, from the family staircase, ‘revolting!' She leans in to pick up the catalogue for her ‘Ongoing' exhibition, which opened at the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam in late 2025, before heading to Athens – it's co-produced by the Onassis Foundation – and will eventually tour globally. Flicking to a photograph of herself wearing said gown, a bow nestled neatly in her hair, Swinton, her voice comically teetering up several octaves, cries ‘I look fabulous!' She turns to Saillard. ‘Before that, I was wearing shorts or a jersey, but this was the first ‘we're getting you a dress' moment. And my brothers said that, but I thought it was fabulous, so there was this feeling that a piece of clothing is valuable, not only in the eye of the beholder, but that I liked it. I felt great in it. So, that was an epiphany for me about how clothes carry meaning.' She smiles. ‘What about you?'

Saillard begins. ‘When I was around seven years old, I discovered the attic. In the attic, I was completely alone and there were boxes and boxes of the clothes of my mother, my sisters, my father, very old pieces. It slowly became my room. I unpacked all the clothes from the boxes,' Saillard continues. ‘I put all of the garments on the floor, and I spent my time as a teenager sleeping on the clothes, smoking, reading… and I realised, when I joined the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the 1980s, and after having slept in the storage room there, when I woke up, it was clear. I was in the same land, the same geography as the attic of my parents.' Swinton gently exhales. ‘Oh, how beautiful. Wow.' ‘This was my first immersion with clothes.'

Swinton conceived and curated ‘Ongoing' to illustrate a ‘fellowship' of collaborators with whom her creative exploration is both longstanding and active. It features directors Joanna Hogg (their mutual short film debut was 1986's Caprice); Derek Jarman (with whom Swinton made eight films and the only member of the cohort no longer alive); Pedro Almodóvar, Luca Guadagnino, Jim Jarmusch and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, alongside photographer Tim Walker and Saillard. It is specifically not a retrospective and includes all new work with the exception of Almodóvar, who is represented by the short film The Human Voice.

Swinton and Saillard were introduced by a mutual friend, artist Katerina Jebb. Swinton recalls that, during their first conversation, Saillard expressed his increasing dissatisfaction with exhibition making and was looking for a way to bring new life to them. ‘It was like the beginning of this flame,' says Swinton. ‘I thought the way Olivier's curiosity leads him, it's a bit like a mystery quest, and that's the way I work. It was very easy and we made this agreement to find a way together to create living exhibitions. Though we didn't know what that meant yet.'

In 2012, at the Palais de Tokyo during Paris Fashion Week, they staged their first piece, ‘The Impossible Wardrobe'. More than 50 items from the collection of the Palais Galliera museum (where Saillard worked at the time), including anonymous items alongside the likes of Coco Chanel's hat, Napoleon's ceremonial dress coat and Schiaparelli's claw gloves, were either held, draped on the body or presented by Swinton. It took an hour. ‘It was a great statement to play with the museum's collection in a respectful way,' explains Saillard. ‘But also it was Fashion Week, and all of these garments were technically unwearable and none of them were for sale.'

Subsequent pieces included 2013's ‘The Eternity Dress', where the pair illustrated, on stage to music, the making of a dress from scratch in 60 minutes, while 2014's ‘Cloakroom – Vestiaire Obligatoire' involved Swinton interacting with items of clothing checked in by the audience; putting money into a pocket, tucking a hair under a collar, kissing a handkerchief. ‘It was radical,' Swinton admits. ‘It was about normal clothes.'

Between 2021-2025, they enacted ‘Embodying Pasolini' – an arresting rebirth of 30 film costumes originally created for the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini by Danilo Donati. Swinton has said of working with these cinematic ensembles: ‘There's still a spirit in them – they hold energy and can spark new dreams.'

The distinction between clothes and fashion is one of several recurring themes in Swinton and Saillard's work. ‘I'm not interested in the fashion of today. I'm always interested in past fashion, but the past could be yesterday,' Saillard suggests. ‘We all have labels, those that are well-known, and those that are not. But the only label I love is this invisible label we give to clothes; some trace of ourselves.' He pauses. ‘I think, step by step, we realised we had opened a door that was not an exhibition and not a fashion show, but something else through the art of the performance. Clothing is a performance every day. It's difficult to talk about clothes, fashion, without speaking about money, looks. I don't think we're talking about that. We are not selling anything.'

‘I think it's all about connection, and that's what clothes have in common with art. Art is about connection. Fashion is very often not about connection at all,' chimes in Swinton. ‘Very often, fashion is about disconnection… an obscuring of identity and a sense of artifice. But the clothes we're talking about, and actually I would suggest the clothes that we're wearing, this is true of all of us, are clothes that contribute a kind of honesty about who we are, and that means we're people who are willing to be seen. We're willing to be known, and we're willing to be in communication. And that's a significant difference between, I would suggest, clothes and a lot of fashion.'

In the days prior to our conversation and after it, ‘The Biographical Wardrobe' is performed multiple times, slightly differently each time, but fundamentally a study of their ever-evolving interest in clothing and how that plays into notions of an identity. It is a tender, hilarious, historical, ceremonious, affectionate sartorial portrait of life and death. It begins with an empty rack of coat hangers, recently found Jarman Super 8 footage of Swinton crawling through stones in a brown overcoat and bare feet unfolding gloriously in the background. Swinton wears her father's silk dressing gown from Harrods and impersonates her mother's make-up routine. She lovingly shares with the audience a sweatshirt that she co-owned with Jarman – ‘It has a little tear under the right armpit, but I can't bring myself to mend it' – and recites, like a poem, the 14 words, including ‘independence', ‘wanderlust' and ‘companionship', that are stitched and emblazoned on the front of a red Raf Simons S/S02 sweatshirt that Swinton wore the first time she met Guadagnino, and again in a new short they made together specifically for ‘Ongoing'.

In part inspired by a piece Saillard had made about his mother following her death – he had seamstresses repair her ‘very ordinary clothes in a very haute couture way' – and coupled with a more narrative approach they had introduced during ‘Embodying Pasolini', discussions for ‘The Biographical Wardrobe' began. ‘I was very interested to think about the way to present a wardrobe of someone like Tilda Swinton because, I have to confess, I have seen many exhibitions of famous people and it's always very frustrating to see their clothes without them. It often reminds me of when you cut the head off an animal and put it on a wall,' says Saillard, smiling. ‘There was a little ghost in the air of making something on my wardrobe,' says » Swinton. ‘And I remember being a little hesitant because I thought, ‘what does that mean?' Because, of course, he [Saillard] wanted it all to be about the clothes that I wear on the red carpet because he has this big fantasy that I live my life on a red carpet [laughs]. I was hesitant for that reason, but then…' ‘Well, that is a moment in the performance,' laughs Saillard, who does, indeed, briefly demand Swinton show him and the audience, somewhat hilariously, how to pose on a red carpet. Side note: ‘I prefer to wear high heels to stay awake,' is one of Swinton's red carpet survival quips.

To make the piece, the pair journeyed to Swinton's ancestral home in Scotland, where, she says, they did a lot of ‘digging' and ‘whittling down'. ‘We developed a code, because there was so much. The things that started to really resonate with us were those that had had more than one life,' she says. ‘The velvet dress I wore to the Edward II premiere is the same dress I wore to the Orlando premiere. These things were like tentpoles for us, and everything that had had more than one life, or anything related to an experience, found its place.'

This spring, another new work, ‘Silent Models', inspired by shop windows and mannequins, was staged at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, as part of Saillard's two-week residency, ‘The Living Museum of Fashion'.

‘It's a very strange, mystical thing,' says Swinton of the piece, which they hope will travel, possibly to London. ‘There's sort of a strange dance we do at the end.' Wearing a black silk dress that couturiers use for fittings, in a room with Joan Mitchell's mighty La Grande Vallée VI abstract oil painting hanging on the wall, Swinton performs multiple gestures, interacting with Saillard and various objects related to historical objects used to display clothing. Saillard might hand her a vintage male mannequin head, Swinton replicating its fake frozen face. At one point, a dressmaker's dummy is swathed in a Madeleine Vionnet violet gown while Swinton is dressed in a duplicate version – a kind of surrealist duet between something living and something not.

‘It is probably the performance that I had in mind since I was in the attic,' laughs Saillard. ‘I was always very fascinated by mannequins in windows. They're not real, not a nice object, it's not sculpture, it's not living. It's supposed to be alive, but it's absolutely not. ‘Silent Models' is a piece about bodies, about presence and absence.'

The latter is another topic that the pair repeatedly return to in their practice. In the ‘Ongoing' catalogue, Swinton says to Saillard that one of the important parts of their work together is that it allows her to be ‘fully present as myself, I'm fully awake… I'm like a vessel with which to carry these gestures, these pieces of clothing, to behave as a lightning conductor for time, for mortality.'

Indeed, the work Swinton and Saillard are making together is serious, curious, poetic and, at times, perfectly peculiar. It also has a strong sense of momentum and future promise. Swinton stands, brushing down her skirt, wrapping up the conversation, as they must dash to start conceiving what will soon become ‘House of Gestures' for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. ‘Truthfully, we have a lot more plans,' she says.

‘Tilda Swinton – Ongoing' is an immersive exhibition co-produced by the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Onassis Foundation, Athens

A version of this article appears in the September 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.