There are fashion obsessives, and then there’s Jean-Denis Franoux. A longtime fashion professor at Studio Berçot and a designer himself from 1994 to 2001, Franoux began collecting perfume bottles as a child before getting hooked on clothes. As a fashion student in Paris in 1990, he spent his spare francs at the Puces, then became an eBay and real-life auction junkie decades before vintage hunting turned into fashion people’s favorite pastime. This is how he bagged multiples from foundational collections by John Galliano, Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, Martin Margiela, and Jean Paul Gaultier—plus countless rarities by Madeleine Vionnet, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, Madame Grès, Jeanne Lanvin, and others—amassing them not out of whim or speculation but from an abiding need to understand the whys and hows of shape.
Today, at 56, Franoux is sitting on an archive of 25,000 pieces and counting. Among his latest scores: an austere yet opulent Balenciaga haute couture gown from winter 1938 in near-mint condition, with zigzag seams, slightly built-up shoulders, and rounded sleeves, that resurfaced on Vinted in Spain. Another: 400-plus original Vionnet toiles, preserved untouched since the designer shuttered her house in 1939. “To me, those are like time machines,” he said. He bought the lot for the sake of his students, he notes, but also to keep it clear of counterfeiters’ hands.
From tonight through Saturday, an invitation-only event at a private space in the Upper Marais will offer a first look at the collective achievement, titled Regarderobes (the name is a portmanteau of the word “look” and “wardrobes”). Now structured as an endowment fund, the collection is legally shielded from sale or dispersal, and will be made available to schools and other institutions. For his curatorial debut, Franoux handpicked about 150 pieces, including 50 complete looks, from mid-1980s era Galliano, Yamamoto, and Comme des Garçons to silhouettes from the 1930s (Hermès, Schiaparelli), ’40s/’60s (Balenciaga, Balmain), and ’70s/’90s (Chloé, Gaultier, Margiela).
Days before the opening, he welcomed Vogue to his Paris apartment/storeroom/makeshift photo studio, where hundreds of finds line racks while others, piled in boxes from floor to ceiling, await their close-up (the bulk of his trove, meanwhile, is biding its time in a storage facility somewhere near his native Epinal, in Eastern France). In a wide-ranging conversation, Franoux talked about the unexpected similarities between perfume and fashion, the “Frankenstein factor,” and why, rather than cashing in—or donating it all to a museum—he decided to create an endowment fund. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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