PORTO-PARIS
"I know that I was very marked by the summer light of Portugal , the colors of the parasols, the flamboyant azulejos which covered the houses and also the beauty of its baroque buildings and these department stores, small theaters with aged woodwork and with old-fashioned charm… The summers of my childhood were spent with my big brother, my big sister and my parents in Porto and its beaches with an almost numbing heat revived by the violence of an indomitable Atlantic….
Joyful nostalgia. I see these images again today like old worn polaroids, rediscovered in memory by a smell, a color, sometimes a garment. As a teenager I read Hervé Guibert on these beaches. In the carefreeness of my youth but already with the will to create my own trajectory. "
PRIVATE PASSION
“I've always been drawn to fashion, and to fashion designers.
I started by collecting clothes fifteen years ago, they were pieces by André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin. I was very drawn to the sixties and seventies, this fantasized vision of the future, of science fiction, this fashion imagery conveyed by Françoise Hardy, Emma Peel, Barbarella, heroines who for me corresponded to a model aesthetic, that of the warrior Amazon, free. I am also thinking of the Prisunic stores and their bags in the shape of a target.
“I switched to Yves Saint Laurent, the Russian collection and the Chinese collection particularly marked me. This refinement, this extreme sensitivity, this taste for travel, have led me to collect again. Azzedine Alaïa's sculptural woman Grace Jones has nothing to do with Catherine Deneuve in a tuxedo, and yet these two designers each created something that did not exist. At the time, we consumed fashion, we did not collect it. This is how I started to build bridges between very different worlds. In the colors of Yves Saint Laurent, I find the light of my childhood. In the cuts of Pierre Cardin or André Courrèges, I find this fascination for the sixties, this shadowless future embodied by all the heroines of television series. "
3 RUE PAUL DUBOIS, 75003
“As a child, we spent all our summers in Porto. I have this memory of strolling through these department stores with a lot of stucco and woodwork, these monumental staircases, old-fashioned shops that had this relationship to service and customers that no longer exist today. I remember those smells of rice powder and bar of soap. We went there to have fun. I wanted to return to personalized service, while recreating the atmosphere of a private club. There is in Plaisir Palace, a dimension both intimate and festive. This store is a 3D playlist. There is no model, no fashion photography. These are almost sculptural objects to wear, which have been worn, preserved. What I like is giving them a second wind in an era that is no longer the same.
I chose to fit out Plaisir Palace like a small neo-pop Eden, with this ultra Fragola mirror by Ettore Sottssas floating in front of this Kvadrat curtain, this Kwok Hoï Chan bench which recalls the seats of nightclubs. We come here to watch, choose, discuss, also share our favorites. It is a natural project. My greatest joy is to give a second life to objects charged with their own history. "
“What makes me happy is to see that these clothes find a new owner. I am attracted by colors, and from Chacok to Juan les Pins, to the roses of Yves Saint Laurent, through the art of modeling Azzedine Alaïa, the common point of all these clothes is the South. Each item of clothing certainly corresponds to a history of fashion, but to a very short story. People are in this need of a moment out of time, and at the same time marked by a presence. How a Saint Laurent blouse, a Courrèges jacket, a Thierry Mugler jacket, an Alaïa dress can interest a twenty-year-old girl, these are the questions that bother me. The quality of execution, both in terms of the cut, the fabric, but also from the point of view, make them remarkable. "
Didier Barroso - Interview conducted by Laurence Benaïm