Les Abattoirs is hosting an exceptional exhibition dedicated to Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, a visionary fashion designer and multifaceted artist. Featuring nearly 300 works, including clothing, design objects, drawings, and photographs, "L'Imagination au pouvoir" (Imagination at work) invites visitors to discover the many facets of an artist whose inventiveness knows no bounds.
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac is a creator; his work is a unique fusion of different artistic expressions. Appropriations and collaborations are at the heart of his practice and make dialogue a mode of creation in itself: between art, fashion, music, history, the sacred, pop culture, and childhood. The artist nourished his career from an early age with a quest for freedom and a deliberate rebelliousness, turning clothing into a work of art, armour, and adornment. Escaping any fixed definition and playing with the boundaries between disciplines, his work transgresses codes and bears witness to an incisive view of an era in flux.
Proclaiming the power of imagination, the exhibition, curated by Lauriane Gricourt, director of Les Abattoirs and Julien Michel, research and exhibitions officer of Les Abattoirs, highlights the different dimensions of a body of work that began in the late 1960s and continues to this day. Through a rich and immersive thematic journey, punctuated by installations created especially for Les Abattoirs, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, a versatile designer, offers an almost initiatory journey into his universe. The use of so-called poor materials upcycling, accumulation, collage, and hybridisation are all gestures and experiments that play on the back-and-forth between fashion and art, resonating with the research of major movements in art history, including Arte Povera, New Realism, and conceptual art. Clothing, drawings, photographs, design objects, and accessories reveal his ability to transform materials and ideas, offering a space for artistic, historical, and societal reflection, a total art form, in short.
Art and fashion are the same for Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. This alliance has led to rich collaborations which, together with his instantly recognisable colour palette, have become his signature: Robert Malaval, Keith Haring, Cindy Sherman, Bettina Rheims, Robert Mapplethorpe, Oliviero Toscani and Lady Gaga rub shoulders with André Courrèges, Max Mara, Ligne Roset, and liturgical commissions for World Youth Day and the reopening of Notre Dame de Paris. These encounters with his contemporaries, some of which are re-enacted in this exhibition, are a testament to the joyful virtuosity of an artist who never ceases to reinvent himself. It is this ability to imagine a different idea of fashion that is at the heart of this exhibition, the first dedicated to this medium at Les Abattoirs.
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac – Imagination at work
December 12, 2025 - August 23, 2026
Les Abattoirs, Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse
76 allées Charles de Fitte - 31300 Toulouse
