EXCLUSIVE: Charles de Vilmorin will chair the 2023 Fashion Jury of the Hyères Festival

PARIS — French designer Charles de Vilmorin, creative director of Rochas, has been chosen as president of the mode jury of the 38th edition of the International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Fashion Accessories of Hyères.

The announcement was made on Wednesday at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, "a real place of fashion, with magnificent exhibitions” like the one recently closed on Schiaparelli, said Pascale Mussard, president of the festival.

"But it's also fashion week and all the houses that show up during this week have certainly someone who went through Villa Noailles, was a winner or a finalist, ”she continued, thanking the founder of the festival Jean-Pierre Blanc and his team for having “trusted and watched” emerging talents. /p> Related Galleries

The accessories jury will be chaired by London jeweler Alan Crocetti, who recently collaborated with Parisian brand Ami , while Berlin-based Dominican American photographer and dancer Luis Alberto Rodriguez, winner of the 32nd edition of the festival, will direct the photography one.

One ​​of the highlights of this year's edition, scheduled for October 12-15, will be the 100th anniversary of the creation of Villa Noailles, the festival's historic modernist residence built by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, patrons of the arts and friends of many influential artists.

Qualifying the family festival which owes a lot to Marie-Laure de Noailles, Mussard describes it as someone a "who had what it takes to create: freedom, an appetite for life, an eye for the smallest things and a taste for celebration and creation in all its expression, even if it ruffles."< /p>

This anniversary will be a great opportunity to "remember that for [the couple], it was not fashion designers on one side and artists on the other, but all the artists they loved were part of the same family,” Blanc had said at a 2022 conference teasing the year-long celebration that will include an hour-long opera performed during the festival.

This year's exhibition at the villa in Hyères will see Marie-Laure's wardrobe de Noailles revisited by personalities from the fashion houses and emerging designers, under the scientific and historical curatorship of Émilie Hammen, who heads the "Chanel Chair and the 19M Savoir-Faire Mode" at the Institut Français de la Mode.

If the young president of the jury surprised the public, Mussard and Blanc agreed that they thought about what the late owner of Villa Noailles would have done. "And she would have chosen someone unknown, someone she met on the street and connected with," Mussard joked.

"The creation of the three [jury presidents] celebrates our times," Blanc said, praising their generosity and enthusiasm as well as the constitution of juries "very representative of what our professions are today".

To select the fashion winners, de Vilmorin will include Antoine Gagey, managing director of Jean Paul Gaultier; Hubert Barrère, artistic director of Lesage; the founder of Numéro, Babeth Djian; fashion critic and writer Sophie Fontanel; TV presenter and comedian Daphne Burki; photographer and director Alice Moitié, and singer-songwriters Flora Fishbach, Pierre de Maere and Bilal Hassani. As tradition dictates, the winner of the Grand Prix Première Vision 2022, Finnish designer Jenny Hytönen, will also join the fashion jury.

The 10 finalists of 2023 are Tiago Bessa (Portugal), Alec Rhys Bizby (England), Fengyuan Dai (France), Igor Dieryck (Belgium), Petra Fagerstrom (Sweden), Leevi Ikäheimo (Finland), Jung Eun Lee (Su...