Pretending to interview Loïc Prigent during Paris Fashion Week is about as illusory as trying to extract the confessions of a Tour de France cyclist in the middle of the climb of Alpe d’Huez. Between 12 shows, the Hercules of the backstage offered us a phone call on a Saturday morning. Even at the end of his rope, he keeps his humor: “You are talking to ruins… Fashion Week is sometimes Kafka in frilly clothes. Yesterday, at the Mugler show, they played hold music made up of three notes for an hour and a half – a real auditory torture. Just after, at the Schiaparelli show, we were told a musical crescendo: twenty minutes of music that was too loud, saturated, unbearable. They had invited too many people, it was super hot, I had half a buttock’s room to seat both mine… You need good mental resistance in this environment! Fortunately, from time to time, you are rewarded by seeing beautiful things – or things so terrible that it reinforces your value system.
Prigent, 51, has been scouring this absurd world for three decades now and telling it on different media – articles, documentaries, social networks. He had already published two hilarious books, “I love fashion but it’s everything I hate” And “Pass me the champagne, I have a cat in my throat”collections of the most astonishing phrases heard among fashionistas who would have enchanted Proust, Truman Capote or Bret Easton Ellis of Glamorama. With A thousand billion ribbons (Grasset), Prigent takes a further step by becoming a fashion historian, and by joining style to the subject. Delicacy of analysis, taste for inventive neologisms, sense of burlesque: there is more literature in this offbeat essay than in 95% of back-to-school novels (official statistic sent to L’Express by the Fédération de la Haute Couture and Fashion).
Why return to books when we are a hit via more modern media? “To be able to go deeper. Television requires us to demonstrate through images what we’re trying to explain, it’s sometimes tricky. The book allows you to digress and be completely out of budget, while every minute is counted when you works in TV. I carried out my investigation for many months, I liked this freedom of looking for things without being limited by time or money.”
Sand, Zola, Mallarmé…
The first volume of A thousand billion ribbons covers the period 1850-1912. The crinoline is the flagship garment, as Prigent explains to us: “It is the dress that most symbolizes fashion: so beautiful and so impractical at the same time. There is a beauty/discomfort gap which borders on the Absurd. It’s a view of the mind and I find it charming that all strata of society could have thought at one time that it was the best… Fashion is weirder than fashion. fiction. It’s impossible to imagine, we would look like crazy screenwriters.” He says it differently in his book: “The crinoline, however, has advantages. It imposes almost total idleness on the person who wears it. Vaguely embroidering is possible. Vaguely reading George Sand. This is not how the MLF will be born .”
Sand returns at another moment in Prigent’s essay, criticizing the followers of Empress Eugénie in these terms: “She makes fun of them, is disgusted by her adornments when they have taken possession of them and invents new ones. other than the husbands will pay, it will be necessary! They say that this makes the business work. Not at all, this process is too abnormal not to cause ruin. The fashion changes every month by court decree, the products do not. sold out clutter the factories or suddenly fall at low prices.” Anna Wintour would have nothing to add regarding this system of headlong flight…
Literature still, Prigent evokes several times The Curee by Zola, “an incredible fashion book which, in 1871, describes in a very precise way the excesses of that time, and talks about the fashion designer Worth, the central character of my own book”. On page 100, Prigent looks at the case of Stéphane Mallarmé who, in 1874, had published several issues of The Latest Fashiona magazine of which he signed all the articles under different pseudonyms (including that of “Madame Satin”): “No one reads it, has read it, will read it, but the reference has since appeared in absolutely all fashion memoirs written by students looking for justification for their rag fascination.”
Hilarious on the other end of the phone, our man adds another layer: “These numbers of The Latest FashionI have read them and not read them. I mean: I tried to read them. At the risk of offending or upsetting Mallarmeans, this is pre-surrealist poetry: a sort of carapace of words, compact and impermeable. Mallarmé understood the importance of Worth, but when he says he loves fashion we don’t understand if he is sincere or in derision. One thing is certain: to quote him at face value, in my opinion, is bullshit.”
One eye on TikTok and another on its library
Loïc Prigent’s amused wanderings in the back kitchens of fashion began in the mid-1990s when he was a young freelancer at Release. Who were his models then? “I adored Michel Cressole and read the other writers of the newspaper: Marie Colmant, Anne Boulay and Gérard Lefort. They wrote without complexes, went all out, with culture and wit. I understood thanks to them that we can write seriously while messing around, laughing at the chaos that exists around the collections.”
Water flowed under the podiums. Having become a reference in his field, does Prigent see a new guard emerging? “Absolutely. Quite a few people have appeared since 2020, a generation of trolls whose looks are becoming more refined. It’s fun to take apart a collection, but if we haven’t seen such a reference, such a subtlety, we lose in credibility… We gain stripes when, after having taken a dig at so-and-so, we prove that we really know our stuff. I especially follow the accounts of Haute Le Mode (on YouTube and TikTok) and Relax It’s Only. Fashion, a stylist for rich clients When everyone has loved a collection, he arrives calmly saying that it won’t suit anyone. So is Prigent. He has one eye on TikTok and another on his library, where The History of Costume in the West by François Boucher: “It’s readable, not copy and paste, and I’m admiring: the author seems to know the evolution of the tie year by year!”
Besides Worth and Empress Eugénie, A thousand billion ribbons highlights Pauline de Metternich, it-girl before her time. Prigent likes to draw parallels, we ask him who their heirs would be today: “Worth, more than a creator, was a merchant of genius. He knew how to connect fashion with the new sales and propagation tools of his time and, in this sense, invented the luxury industry. Its current equivalent is Bernard Arnault. Empress Eugénie is Kim Kardashian. As for Pauline de Metternich, it is Aya Nakamura. good words, she’s funny and unexpected, she creates controversy, she makes the haters angry…” At that, Prigent is about to hang up for a slightly snobbish reason: he has to go to the Hermès fashion show. We wish him a lot of fun. He laughs one last time into his phone: “Yes, I know it sounds chic to say that, but be careful, it’s also work!”
A thousand billion ribbonsby Loïc Prigent, Grasset, 202 p., €19.
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