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We can’t avoid our destiny, believes the celebrated couturier Christian Lacroix, who dreamed of becoming a curator in his youth, and is acting today as set designer for the exhibition “L’Orient des Femmes’ at the Musée du quai Branly. With 150 outfits and sets from the Near-East, which convey strong tradition and ancestral savoir faire, Christian Lacroix pays homage to oriental women.

Musée du quai Branly, “L’Orient des Femmes” until the 15th of May 2011.

Christian Lacroix : I believe that we can’t avoid our destiny and that finally our fantasies, our dreams, and the ambitions we had when we were young end up being the strongest. The first dream I had was to become an illustrator, I was in the process of doing illustrations for children’s books, and then after that I thought about going into the theatre for a long time, I’m actually working on four productions in Germany at the moment, and soon after one in Paris with Polalydes. And then, just to please my parents, because I really loved museums, I studied to be curator, but I went off that because there weren’t any museums like this at the beginning of the 1970’s. I was really quite, without exaggeration, overwhelmed by this exhibition, by this task to display these dresses which are simultaneously very humble and extremely opulent. It’s fascinating because we can see that over thousands of years, these shapes have never changed. And at the same time each dress is unique, and was made in the image of the girl who embroidered it herself. The exhibition follows a path that goes straight from the North to the South. But for the end we really wanted to give Stéphane Martin what he was looking for. He trusted us, to move from black to colour, and then where the was colour there is white, and light, and this little girl’s dress, which I find absolutely mesmerising, it’s fascinating, it was found in 1991, intact, buried in a cave in Lebanon.

Music : Artiste : Gorillaz Album : Plastic Beach Title : White flag ( Feat Bashy Kano and the National Orchestra for Arabic Music) Ref : Capitol Recods