Exhibitions 40th Festival Fashion Photography Accessories
Arhant Shresta Photo “Loose Fist” - Chiyang Duan Acessories “Hat-trick” - Romain Bichot art craft - Basile Pelletier Photo “Un temps pour vivre” - Dolev Elron Premiere Vision

Arhant Shresta, Grand Prix du Jury de la Photographie 7L 2024 : “Loose Fist”
These images bear witness to an exercise in reconciliation with fear. At the end of 2023, Arhant Shresta and his partner were victims of a violent homophobic attack perpetrated by a group of young men in his hometown of Kathmandu. He developed a fear of men. The pain he endured as a result of this isolated incident led his brain to make a radical misjudgement: out of anxiety, he perceived an external danger coming from a group that, collectively, had nothing to do with the individuals who had assaulted him. He wants to find some kind of resolution to his pain. He understands that the heart of my conflict is internal: his anger confronted with his own powerlessness in the face of fear.

Chiyang Duan, Grand Prix du Jury Accessoires 2024 “Hat-trick”
The London-based Chinese designer returns to the festival with surprising accessorised bags, following on from the eyewear collection that won him last year’s Grand Prix. Attentive to his everyday surroundings, he celebrates the beauty of the most modest accessories spotted here and there. “The inspiration for this collection primarily comes from the idea of transforming extravagant, demure hats into bags. Since hats themselves are already a perfect design, I didn’t alter their shape, but instead added or removed some details giving them a sense of conflict and humor that similar to contemporary art.”

Romain Bichot, Prix le19M des Métiers d’art
The project is a fusion of a trench coat and a mattress found in the street. The idea behind this trench coat is to rework a wardrobe archetype and combine it with the shape of the mattress, an object developed in my first collection presented in competition last year. The left half is a classic trench coat, while the right half is stretched and wrapped around, thickening at the front to rest on the shoulder. This wrapping gesture echoes the red mattress from my 2024 collection. On the front, the red jacquard inscription “nothing really mattress”, like a tag, adorns the garment. Details evoke the mattress, such as the pockets inspired by the side handles and the floral pattern of the fabric.

Basile Pelletier, Prix de la Photographie American Vintage 2024 : “Un temps pour vivre”
Un temps pour vivre« 我們是不是只能知道一半的事情啊 ? » — “Can we only know half the truth?” asks Yang-Yang in Edward Yang’s film Yi Yi. The child photographs the backs of his loved ones so that they can see what they themselves never see. This childish, poetic gesture inspires Basile Pelletier’s photographic work. He draws on it for the idea of a fragile half-truth as an aesthetic and critical terrain. The title of the series, borrowed from Hou Hsiao-Hisen’s film, A Time to Live, a Time to Die, retains only the first half. This omission is not an oversight, but intentional: to emphasise this inherent incompleteness. As a Frenchman in Taiwan, Basile shapes his perspective from a position of strangeness; he can never claim to know the whole truth about the other, but in this lack, he creates, in fragments, a space of openness. His series explores what surfaces, what escapes, between reality and fiction. And if the title retains “A Time to Live”, it is also because it is a reflection on youth. Produced during a six-month university stay in Taiwan to prepare a thesis entitled Growing Up in New Taiwanese Cinema, the series draws directly on this immersion. It offers us photography without actors, but not without staging. The models—friends and acquaintances—are not mere extras. They modestly embody the tension between lived experience and staging. Some documentary images sit alongside constructed scenes, displayed together as if they belonged to the same narrative. In each one, wandering and waiting take shape. Presented as a nod to the fashion industry —whose codes it subverts— Un temps pour vivre questions our relationship with the gaze: what does it mean to see, to represent? The exhibition does not aim to tell a complete story, but rather to capture a state, a threshold: that of youth suspended between childhood and adulthood.

Dolev Elron, Grand Prix du Jury Premiere Vision
EntanglementsEntanglements is a collection of portraits of men I have met, desired or imagined. It was inspired by friends, lovers, strangers, icons and clichés. Memories and moments translated into movements. A physical gesture lies at the core of each garment, exploring the complex and sometimes confusing relationships we hold with each other and with our clothes. Jeans warped around the waist. A belt tangled around itself. A trench coat leaning off balance. Trousers bending in an endless loop. A baseball cap, usually worn to shield and conceal, is curved upwards. Boxer briefs, an iconic piece of merchandise and the ultimate thirst trap, altered in perspective. Each gesture is an intentional disruption of function, revealing or morphing parts of the male body. It mimics a digital distortion that, by now is strangely analog.
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Expositions - 40e Festival international de mode, de photographie et d’accessoires
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