Paris’s Fashion Museum Gets a New Director
As director of the Palais Galliera for the last eight years, Olivier Saillard
elevated the city of Paris’s fashion museum to must-visit status, thanks to
programming that encompassed everything from performance pieces by Tilda Swinton
to the first Azzedine Alaïa retrospective in the city. So the fashion community
was stunned last summer when Mr. Saillard abruptly announced he was quitting in
January to become artistic director of J.M. Weston, the French luxury men’s shoe
company.
A guessing game about who might take his place followed. In December, the
answer was revealed: a relatively unknown Spaniard named Miren Arzalluz.
A political historian by training and Basque by birth, the 39-year-old Ms.
Arzalluz had honed her curating skills for eight years as the head of the
Cristóbal Balenciaga Foundation in Getaria, Spain. She said she was hesitant to
apply for the Galliera post (she had been happy in her most recent job, as
director of the Etxepare Basque Institute, a cultural center in San
Sebastián).
But she ultimately pursued it because, she said, “this job was really going
back to my thing.”
So what is her thing? Here is her explanation:How did you end up in a museum,
if you studied politics?
I studied history, worked at a British think tank, earned my master’s in
comparative politics at the London School of Economics. It was just after 9/11.
The world was in such turmoil. I started going to the Victoria & Albert
Museum for fashion exhibitions. Then I remember walking into the National
Portrait Gallery bookshop and seeing a whole section on fashion history. It was
a revelation. When you study history, it’s to be a social or political
historian. But fashion? That was something that I had never dreamt of. I went to
the Courtauld Institute of Art in Somerset House for a master’s in history of
dress, and fell in love with the subject. I thought: “Oh, this is what I want to
do.”
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