Procession aside, the evening highlighted modernity: The costumes for Juliano Nunes’s new Rings of Saturn, a duet for Louvet and Marchand, were designed by Matthieu Blazy for Chanel. There followed Vers un Pays Sage by Jean-Christophe Maillot, director of the Ballets de Monte-Carlo, a tribute to his father, the artist Jean Maillot. It featured minimalist white bodysuits, tank tops, and trousers set against a backdrop of constantly changing color blocks.
The more somber Busk by Aszure Barton closed a three-hour program that received rapturous applause. Afterward, as more than 750 guests drifted toward their tables—featuring a menu curated by three chefs— Sarah Andelman praised Blazy’s look for Marchand and Louvet. “It was a real success—it’s that clash of contemporary and classical that makes the evening so special. Vive Paris!”
A former dancer himself, the designer Alain Paul said he was taken with the evening’s contemporary spirit. “What people have in mind of dance and the Opéra is always the tutus, of course, but it’s really not only that—tonight was proof. They give you so many different styles in one night,” he said, noting that his friend Louvet had been among the ravers on his runway just last week. Of Maillot’s number, he added, “it had a very New York energy that was super impressive, like Merce [Cunningham] or Martha Graham with minimal, sharp lines—it had its own, youthful language.”
Of Blazy’s costumes—navy cotton poplin shirts re-embroidered with Lurex, silk velvet, and cotton threads in the colors of Saturn’s rings, with gold-trimmed navy buttons, and barrel trousers in black grain de poudre—Marchand admitted he was surprised at first. “I was expecting something that would show the dancer’s body a bit more,” he said, adding that he was won over by how it made him and Louvet—friends since the age of 13—look like twins. “It’s exactly the same colors— poppy, green, blue—that were used to sew on the corsets. You can see all the craft, the haute couture tradition, in the way it’s knitted into the shirt.”
The défilé, he observed, was like watching the cycle of life. “I was a little kid myself, looking at the étoiles and thinking, ‘I want to be there one day. I want this to be my life’—and now I look at them and see heads full of dreams, and I see the strength of this institution. We all pass through and we try to deliver the best for this house, and the house remains. It’s been like that for 350 years.”