Guénolée Milleret's iconotheque or the French art of living

Like every year, the Salon du Patrimoine is held at the Carrousel du Louvre! One of the real questions we ask ourselves when we see all these marvellous craftsmen and know-how is what is the French art of living yesterday, today and tomorrow? We would like to talk to you about Guénolée Milleret. She is an author, iconographer and teaches the history of fashion and costume at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She has long collected engravings and lithographs of fashion, furniture, interior views, architecture and gastronomy from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Selected pieces of this collection - containing 13,000 documents to date and regularly enriched with unpublished images - are freely accessible on the website www.imagesguenomiller.com: the iconotheque of the French art of living...

How would you describe yourself?
I would define myself as a seeker and a passer of memory. One word links all my activities: transmission. Whether it is through my books or when I speak to my students, I am driven by one ambition: to pass on a taste for beauty (and the well-made). I take to heart the doctrine of the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs: "To maintain in France the culture of the arts which pursue the realisation of Beauty in the Useful".

But to transmit, you have to develop a graphic discourse. A friend of mine describes me as an "archaeologist of images": for the past ten years or so, I have been digitising in very high definition and restoring graphically the images of the collections and works I regularly acquire. To "make work" through the collection is to reconstitute a "living" past in the light of which, I hope, the present time is nuanced and the future is invented.

How did you come up with the idea of creating a unique icon library, ranging from fashion to architecture, interior design and gastronomy?
When I was in charge of the documentary archives of Yves Saint Laurent prêt-à-porter between 1999 and 2008, I observed at close quarters the very pragmatic relationship that designers had with fashion heritage. In fact, it is the 'piquant du fantôme' that wise designers are looking for, an expression to be credited to Baudelaire. Above all, do not plagiarise the past, but keep only the piquant which "will take on the light of the movement of life, and will become present".

In other words, contemporary creation projects, consciously or unconsciously, a colossal heritage into a sharpened perception of the zeitgeist.

From the images of the past, creating new original works in a digital format, recording and ordering them in an online image library, is a real gold mine for creative people and aesthetes.

How would you define the French art of living? How does it resonate in the 21st century?
The French art of living is of course a set of styles that belong to their respective eras and... past! But it is backward-looking if we limit ourselves to this definition. The French art of living cannot be reduced to a history of styles, it refers above all to an aesthetic posture, which is fortunately timeless.

In France, since at least the reign of Louis XIV, we have cultivated a way of life that involves a constant aestheticisation of everyday life. For example, when we sit down to eat in a restaurant, we hope to experience an idealized moment. Even if this culinary experience is ephemeral, of the intangible order, everything will have been skilfully orchestrated - the décor, the table, the food - so that it remains an exceptional moment.

The taste for the ideal drives us, and fashion is also a symptom of this: matching the elegance of the Parisian woman remains a major challenge for foreigners... Fashion also requires a setting for its presentation, which is why it is inseparable from decoration and architecture. If the walls of the first elegant cafés in the capital, such as the Procope in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, were decorated with large mirrors - an innovation of the time - it was so that the dresses of the elegant women could be reflected in them... But beware, the French art of living is not only a matter of the elite and of luxury: in the Paris of the 1950s, the thrifty and discreet midinette knows better than anyone else how to handle her evening gown like a queen for the evening.

In reality, the French art of living is a national brand image! In the age of globalisation, it still resonates as a standard of Taste, a requirement of Quality.

How can we justify the interest of a heritage collection to young creators who are in a hurry to stamp their era with originality, while the roots and tradition send out inhibiting signals?
The French art of living has never remained a prisoner of its traditions, quite the contrary. Its openness to foreign cultures and know-how is proof of its creative abundance. There is nothing more international than French cuisine and Parisian haute couture!

The strength of French cuisine, in particular, is the insatiable curiosity of its chefs. It is not reduced to a corpus of fixed regional recipes, but rather it refines methods over time and diverts uses or products to better delight our senses, leaving the field open to all sorts of variations. On this basis, French cooks of all periods create something new and prove that the heritage of tradition is a key to innovation.

Similarly, haute couture is a model of internationalisation before its time and, as early as 1910, refuted a single "Franco-Parisian" model: the Italian Elsa Schiaparelli, the Spaniard Cristobal Balenciaga, the Swiss Robert Piguet and later the Lebanese Elie Saab, the Dutch Viktor & Rolf, the Franco-Tunisian Azzedine Alaia, etc., have all come to enrich the fashion heritage with their own heritage and vision. Art and culture are so much richer when borders become porous, when cross-fertilisation takes place...

Innovation and cross-fertilisation are therefore the founding pillars of the French art of living: notions which, in themselves, drive contemporary creation.

Can you explain your documentary approach in more detail?
The images come mainly from the fashion press, documentary art publishing, specialised publications and collections and books that are often rare and therefore difficult to consult. Digitisation ensures permanent preservation. Graphic retouching also makes it possible to restore the image's potential for desirability to the contemporary eye, to rediscover the smooth, sometimes mannered aesthetic that predominates in the documentary art of these periods. Each reproduction is therefore the subject of in-depth graphic retouching, in order to restore the precision of the line and the brilliance of the colours, and to offer images that are entirely restored, as if they were "new".Finally, the thesaurus contains more than 2,000 key words: a formidable lexical resource that unfolds an advanced fashion lexicon or a devilishly greedy palette of colours! Colour enthusiasts should find something to their liking...

What are the ambitions for the iconotheque of the French art of living?
All these images form a formidable tangle of decorative languages, shapes, styles, materials and generated effects... Tens of thousands of documents later, I hope that the iconotheque will become a well-oiled dream machine! Nourished by these ever more numerous, rare and precious images, it is now up to the creators to imagine even more imaginary worlds...

What is your dream?
It is said that Paris is an open-air history book. However, beyond history, it is also an Art of Time that the capital unfolds before our eyes, which evokes sensations and stimulates the imagination. Proust made a myth out of his memorised sensations: there is nothing nostalgic about Proust's famous "Madeleine" - quite the contrary! In fact, my dream is that we can finally project ourselves, armed with our aesthetic ghosts, into a new and exciting era where creation is king.