PARIS • French designer Agnes b. does not like the fashion world of which she is one of the great survivors.
"I don't like fashion. I have nothing to do with that world where everyone is in a bubble," said the veteran creator, a lifelong activist for progressive causes.
"Some people like to go out and be seen," said the 78-year-old, who dressed her friend, the late singer David Bowie, for decades and who made the famous black jacket with the leather collar that actor John Travolta wore in the movie Pulp Fiction (1994).
Like her, Bowie would run a mile from the "celebrity scene", she said.
Both, however, shared a passion for all kinds of modern art.
And now, Agnes b. – whose real name is Agnes Trouble – is opening her own gallery in an up-and-coming corner of the French capital.
Fab will not only house her eclectic private collection of more than 5,000 works – half of them photographs – but will also, she promised, be a "factory of culture and social solidarity".
Next to Station F, the world's biggest start-up incubator in the shadow of France's national library, the designer wants to put fizz into what was a soulless corner of the French capital.
Her idea is to bring together the art, music, fashion and publishing worlds with the neighbourhood's young tech crowd and its multi-ethnic working-class residents.
Even as she approaches her eighth decade, the grandmother of 16 and great-grandmother of 19, has lost none of the daring, drive and curiosity that helped her build a fashion empire of 300 boutiques, largely in Asia.
Indeed, Fab's first show is called La Hardiesse, or The Audacious One, a nod to the self-taught designer who started out in fashion as a penniless young single mother with twin boys to look after.
Back then, after marrying a much older man straight from school, the young Agnes Bourgois (hence Agnes b.) dreamt of being a museum curator.
Now, she has a collection of Basquiats, Warhols, Nan Goldins, Martin Parrs and paintings by Gilbert & George, all of her own that many institutions would mortgage themselves for.
But Agnes b. sees herself more as a motherly custodian than a collector of artists who can fall rapidly out of favour.
The art world can be just as ruthless and as capricious as fashion.
"Suddenly, no one cares about what these artists have done and they drop them. I don't like that," she said.
For her, an artwork becomes "an orphan when it leaves an artist's studio. It needs to be adopted, loved, seen and understood," the designer insisted.
Born in Versailles, near Paris, into a genteel but impoverished Catholic family, Agnes b.'s adolescence was marked by abuse by her uncle.
It took her more than 60 years to tackle the subject with the film Je M'appelle Hmmm (My Name Is Hmmm, 2013), which she wrote and directed, although she insisted it was not her story.
Agnes b. married Christian BourgoisRead More – Source
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