MEDI1TV Afrique : #Chronique_culture du 05/02/2025 - 05/02/2025
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00:00Welcome to Mediane TV and for this cultural chronicle, I bring you, dear viewers, to the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech.
00:17The museum houses, hold on tight, until January 2026, the new exhibition on the creations of Yves Saint Laurent, creations from a private collection.
00:29And to tell us about this magnificent new exhibition here at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech, I have the pleasure of having with me Madison Cox, President of the Jardin Majorelle Foundation.
00:40Madison Cox, thank you very much for accepting our invitation. An exhibition that will last a year. What can you tell us about it?
00:47First of all, it is a pleasure to welcome you here. For the first time here at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech, and even at the museum elsewhere,
00:57we present a small part of a large collection by an English collector who has more than 6,000 pieces in his collection, which he has kept and collected for more than 40 years.
01:14And among these 6,000 pieces, he has a few hundred original pieces by Yves Saint Laurent.
01:21So this is an opportunity for us to show the gaze of a collector. It is always very interesting to see which aspects fascinate someone.
01:34The work of Yves Saint Laurent is so rich. And what is interesting is that Hamish Bowles, the collector in question, who lives in London but who has a great figure in international fashion,
01:47accepted and chose Marrakech as the first place to present a part of his collection.
01:54So this part of this collection, you said so well, not only is it the first time it is presented in Morocco, but it is presented in the world.
02:02So when you discovered this collection, when you came across these creations, which are magnificent, with this scenography,
02:10because each time the Yves Saint Laurent Museum surprises its spectators. It is the 7th, the 8th, the 9th collection, but it surprises us with this magnificent scenography.
02:19What can you tell us about this partnership between this collector, this scenographer and, of course, the Yves Saint Laurent Museum?
02:28I believe that one of our roles as a museum, which is a mono-museum in a certain sense, a museum dedicated to Yves Saint Laurent,
02:36but as we have a second room, a temporary room, where we discover other aspects of Moroccan culture or a confrontation with other cultures vis-à-vis Morocco.
02:49This time, I also found it interesting because this collector is English. He is English, he has a very different perspective than others,
02:59especially from the Pierre Berger Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in Paris. He has chosen an Irish scenographer, which is also very interesting
03:09because until now we have worked a lot with Moroccan or French scenographers.
03:15It is also a way for our team at the museum to confront with another methodology, another philosophy and another way of presenting fashion.
03:25What is fabulous and magical is this setting that is imagined here, especially for this exhibition.
03:33So, I find it interesting, of course, for the public to discover the work of Yves Saint Laurent, which was little known, number one.
03:46Number two, it is interesting for the teams of our museum to be confronted with other methodologies.
03:54As you know, our team is a young Moroccan team. We are 225 people, but in the museum there are five people.
04:07They are young Moroccans, especially Moroccans, and two young women, who have been able, thanks to this museum, thanks to these exhibitions,
04:17to travel either to Japan, or to California, or to Portugal.
04:22I think this is also one of our roles, to train young people to be able to be as experts as others.
04:33So, Madison Cox, as I said, is a private collection that has been bought here and there, of course.
04:40These are also clothes that have been worn. So, these are clothes that tell stories.
04:46When you saw them, how did you... I know it's not easy, you have a lot of clothes, but you had to choose about sixty, which we will present.
04:55How was this choice made and on what basis?
04:59Again, I think we must always support people. In this case, Hamish Bowles, who is a collector, who has been collecting for forty years, as you said,
05:14most of his clothes were worn by women.
05:21By the way, he has a huge collection that dates back to the beginning of the 20th century until today.
05:29So, I named him as an invited curator. So, it was him who made the choice.
05:36He made the choice with, of course, his two assistants, plus the set designer, as I told you, Patrick MacKinneth, who was Dutch.
05:45And so, this marriage was very interesting because they have a different way of looking at the work of Saint-Laurent.
05:51And so, it was also, as I told you earlier, for our teams, quite fascinating, because these are clothes, not prototypes, but real clothes that were sometimes a little worn,
06:03or that have lived, that have had a life. So, sometimes the tassels, sometimes this or that.
06:11But that's what's interesting too. These are real clothes, in a certain sense.
06:17And even if these are haute couture pieces, by definition, haute couture is over-sized,
06:24it also means that the pieces were not always exactly identical to those that were on display at the Yves Saint Laurent show.
06:32And above all, because we, the Pierre Berger Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, we mainly present prototypes.
06:39And this time, it's also a way, for the first time, we present works that don't come from our collection.
06:46So, maybe one last question. When you saw this collection, which I imagine you also discovered, were you surprised by the work of Yves Saint Laurent?
06:59Did you discover something that you didn't know about?
07:02What is very interesting with Hamish Bowles is that he also, like any collector, has a certain part of a work, of an artist,
07:12whose passion is perhaps more than ours.
07:15And a part of Yves Saint Laurent's work is the very early work, when Yves Saint Laurent was 18, 19, 20 years old,
07:22when he worked at Christian Dior.
07:25And so, the first part, in fact, the exhibition is divided into three parts.
07:28The period at Christian Dior, Maison de Couture, and after, the first part, so, Livre-Gauche.
07:35And so, Hamish Bowles also has this passion for his clothes from the late 1950s, which the Yves Saint Laurent Foundation has very few models.
07:43And so, it was also very interesting for me, but of course also for the museum's team, the museum's conservators, and the collection,
07:52to discover these pieces that we are quite poor. So, it was also a way to enrich ourselves.
07:58Madison Cox, thank you very much for accepting our invitation.
08:01And I would like to remind you that you are the president of the Fondation Jardin Majorelle,
08:05and that the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech hosts, until January 2026,
08:10a magnificent exhibition of a private collection on the collections of Yves Saint Laurent.
08:16So, dear viewers, you have no excuse not to come here and discover this magnificent exhibition and magnificent scenography.
08:26Merci à vous, chers téléspectateurs, pour votre fidélité. Restez avec nous.
08:29L'information se poursuit sur nos différents canaux, Médiennes TV Arabique, Médiennes TV Afrique, Médiennes TV Maghreb,
08:35et bien évidemment sur notre média digital, medianews.com.