This winter, Les Abattoirs in Toulouse turns technicolor. Beneath its industrial arches, banners sway like pop flags — printed, cut, stretched, loud. It’s Imagination at Work, a full-blown celebration of Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, the fashion rebel who’s been remixing art, clothes, and culture for six wild decades.
Castelbajac is fashion’s great hybrid thinker — part designer, part dreamer, part visual DJ. He’s the guy who stitched coats from army blankets in the ’60s, made dresses out of poems and teddy bears, and blurred the sacred with the street long before anyone else dared. His world has always been one where Mickey Mouse can meet Madonna, and a priest’s robe can glow like pop art.
Inside the exhibition, around 300 pieces — from garments to drawings, collages to holy vestments — fill nearly 900 square meters. Each section feels like a chapter in a visual autobiography:
“Under Cover” revisits those first blanket coats, punk in spirit and gentle in heart — the start of a lifelong obsession with protection and reinvention. “High Protection” turns ponchos and uniforms into shields, half armor, half hug. Then come the “Emotion Words” — his poem-dresses and book-dresses that make language wearable, fashion as literature.
Things get wild in “Accumulations”: garments made of toys, gloves, and plastic objects — couture colliding with chaos. “Hip-Hop Pop: Urban Heraldry” brings his pop icons to life — Mickey, Marilyn, Warhol, Haring — symbols stitched into street energy.
Then “Garments of Light” flips the tone again, revealing his spiritual side through the vestments created for the Notre-Dame de Paris reopening in 2024 — radiant, sincere, still utterly Castelbajac.
The finale is pure freedom: collages that fuse drawings, textiles, and photos into electric mosaics. Old-school Dada meets new-age joy.
Imagination at Work isn’t a look back — it’s a reminder that creativity is survival, and play is resistance. Jean-Charles de Castelbajac has always worked in color the way others breathe air. He doesn’t just make clothes; he builds universes.
And in Toulouse, he’s inviting everyone in.
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. Imagination at Work – 12 December 2025 to 23 August 2026 at Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse
