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On April 4th, Pénélope Blanckaert and Loic Gouzer hosted a preview of the auction of a 1967 Metallic Dress by Paco Rabanne. The event was held at Hotel Grand Amour in Paris from 7 to 9 pm. It was attended by selected individuals who were there to witness and admire the designer’s iconic dress that revolutionized the fashion industry. This event was a meeting point for a group of collectors chosen to participate in the private auction on Gouzer’s app, Fair Warning, on Thursday April 11th at 5:30 pm E.T. The auction will allow them to bid for this unique piece of fashion history.
While some people still choose to buy fast-fashion items that quickly lose their value, an increasing number of fashion lovers are investing in high-end pieces like the previous generation would invest in a house. Until recently, the most sought-after items were Hermes bags, valued at double or triple their original price due to the brand’s strict selling policy. As a matter of fact Sotheby’s broke a record in 2022 by selling a Diamond Himalaya Birkin bag for $450,000.
This new business opportunity has been embraced by many of the biggest auction houses, including ArtCurial, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s, which have opened fashion departments to meet the growing demand from their clients. “While industry professionals and experts have always collected fashion items, more and more individuals are now getting interested,” says Penelope Blanckaert, owner of an eponymous fashion curation company who will soon open her own auction house “Penelope’s”. Indeed, the market has seen exponential growth in recent years, and this trend has been further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the number of Chinese clients tripled.
This upcoming fashion auction is not an average event. It is the first to be hosted on Fair Warning, an exclusive app created by Loic Gouzer, the man behind the highest-priced artwork ever sold at an auction. Gouzer, the former Co-Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s has developed Fair Warning as a community-based, private auction platform. Members of the app’s hand-picked community receive weekly opportunities to bid on a single art piece, with auctions always taking place on Thursdays.
The auctioned dress is part of Paco Rabanne’s 1967 spring/summer collection of “12 unwearable dresses in contemporary materials”. This legendary piece has been featured in some of the best museums in the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York City, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Musee des Arts décoratifs in Paris, among others. It’s no wonder that Gouzer chose this specific dress for his first fashion sale. “I met Loic through a mutual friend who introduced us because he wanted to auction a fashion piece on Fair Warning,” shared Penelope Blanckaert. “He told me he wanted something exceptional and iconic, such as the Paco Rabanne metallic dress. It’s an item I had never found myself in the past, almost as rare as a Mondrian by Saint Laurent. It’s almost a miracle because it turns out that I found it the same day,” said the fashion expert.
Paco Rabanne’s masterpiece dress, which was auctioned at a starting price of 30,000, holds a lot of promises. The fashion curator commented, “The metallic dress is so unique it could even be installed in the middle of a room and admired as if it were a Calder Mobile.” Rabanne created this collection right after graduating from the famous Parisian art school “Les Beaux Arts.” His pioneering use of metal in fashion was revolutionary for his contemporaries, including influential figures like Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. She once quipped, “He is not a couturier; he’s a metallurgist,” acknowledging his groundbreaking work with materials while playfully referencing the industrial nature of his designs.
No one will argue the excellent craftsmanship of this generation of fashion artisans who blurred the lines between art and fashion. This being said, we couldn’t help but ask the expert what would make a more contemporary piece worthy of auction. “It has to be a piece of fashion history, I guess. I can easily see pieces from Iris Von Herpen or Kevin Germanier be introduced at auctions in the future, ” said Blanckaert before adding, “It’s also about scarcity. The most sought-after items from a fashion house are often the very first collections produced in limited quantities and have a stronger stylistic DNA.” We at Haize couldn’t agree more with this statement because, at the end of the day, authenticity and uniqueness are attributes of beauty that will never lose their value in the eyes of experts and lovers of the arts and fashion style.
