Youthful energy characterises Hyères Festival

The international fashion, photography and accessories festival in Hyères, France, opened on Thursday with a feeling of unusual excitement. The festival, the world’s oldest emerging designer competitio, appears to have found a new freshness for its 38th edition, as it also celebrates the centenary of Villa Noailles, home to the event until Sunday October 15.

A large, eclectic crowd of trend-setters, students, luxury industry representatives and decision-makers, as well as neighbours and locals, gathered in the late afternoon on Thursday on a hill overlooking Hyères, congregating as usual in the forecourt of Villa Noailles, the elegant modernist building which, a century ago, became a hub for avant-garde art and culture, hosting gala evenings, meetings and performances sponsored by philanthropists Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, the villa’s owners.
 
“This centenary has made us think about the next 100 years for this venue and the Festival. The idea is to continue to follow in the footsteps of this visionary couple. Freedom to create, to think, and to be welcoming must be the plan for the next 100 years,” said to FashionNetwork.com Pascale Mussard, who chairs the Festival alongside founder Jean-Pierre Blanc, with whom she officially opened the event on Thursday.

“We must protect at all costs this love of diversity, and this openness towards youth and creativity. Back in those days, when Marie-Laure de Noailles gave them her backing, Man Ray, Giacometti, Dali and René Char were just twenty-year-old guys. That was real patronage,” said Mussard. “Villa Noailles must remain an ebullient place where one can discover and admire designers never seen anywhere else before. With all that’s happening in the world right now, culture, young people, innovation and resistance are all extremely important. It could all vanish very quickly. This kind of visionary freedom, we wish to preserve it, but it’s not a given,” she added.
  
Also present at the opening ceremony were local authorities, representatives of the event’s main sponsors and partners, Pascal Morand, president of the French Fashion and Haute Couture Federation, and the presidents of the competition’s three juries: French designer Charles de Vilmorin for the fashion category, jewellery designer Alan Crocetti for the accessories category, and Dominican-American artist Luis Alberto Rodriguez for the photography category.
 

de Vilmorin, only 26, struggled to hide his emotions. “It’s my first time at the Hyères Festival. I applied for it three, four years ago, but I wasn’t selected. Coming here as jury president, it’s crazy. It’s a dream,” he told FashionNetwork.com. “I regard my work on the jury more as a dialogue than a competition. I was a finalist at the Andam and LVMH prizes, and I won neither. I know what it feels like to be a finalist. I want everyone to be appreciated,” he concluded.
 
“All festivals should be based on youth. Do we need to be young to be generous? Well, it’s obvious here,” said Blanc. Indeed, you could breathe this freshness and contagious energy everywhere at the festival, in the gardens and inside the villa, which seems to be enjoying a new lease of life. It has been redecorated, renovated and revamped, full of pictures and mementoes of Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles. It exudes warmth, as though they were still living in it. It is ready to welcome the next generations of designers.