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They’re being called the fashion Olympics for a reason. This summer’s games in Paris will feature 3,000 unique looks across the opening and closing ceremonies, including styles by Louis Vuitton and Dior — both owned by premier sponsor LVMH — and a dozen emerging French and European designers.
French journalist and TV presenter Daphné Bürki, the 2024 Olympics’s stylist and costume director, assembled the team of designers, and has been working for two years with Olivier Bériot, a costume designer, to dress the performers at each ceremony. Bürki was appointed by Thomas Jolly, artistic director of the opening and closing Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies. The names of the designers are being kept under wraps.
“Each silhouette tells a story,” Bürki told reporters on Thursday during a press conference in Saint-Denis, with Jolly and Tony Estanguet, the head of the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee. “We wanted a circular ceremony, with a mix of newly created pieces, vintage, upcycled pieces. We are rewriting the codes of the ceremonies.” She declined to reveal much detail about the looks, but said, “The key word is ‘mix’: of generations between the designers, of style with inclusivity, and of sourcing with a lot of upcycling.”
“In many ceremonies, [one] designer is chosen for all the costumes,” Jolly recently told me during a conversation at Unesco. “I preferred the mosaic [approach] because we have so much talent in this country, so many creators in all fields who are dazzling.”
The opening ceremony is to be held for the first time on the Seine. Some 320,000 visitors are expected on its banks on 26 July, with a global broadcast audience of more than 2 billion people. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics reached a global broadcast audience of more than 3 billion people.
Around 100 people are making the costumes in Saint-Denis outside Paris and 20 ateliers across France. “We have done 85 per cent of them so far and the major rehearsals start in 10 days so we are on time,” Bürki said. On the day of the show, there will be 200 dressers and 288 hair and makeup artists. “We’re creating the greatest show of the 21st century,” she said.
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