Morellet’s Primaries

Art x Fashion Edit #44

There’s something quietly radical about how François Morellet’s Relâche n°4 repositions the act of looking. Composed in 1992 and held by the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the piece draws from a lexicon of grids, neon, lacquered aluminium, and chance, inviting its viewer into a dialogue between rigidity and release. Though the work sits within the FLV collection, its sensibility felt deeply resonant when viewed after the Minimal hang at Bourse de Commerce. The exhibition highlights that minimalism, at its most compelling, is about precision and the exactitude of gesture.

This principle of exactitude became a through-line in styling this week’s edit. Inspired by Relâche n°4, I anchored the outfit in form, light, and structure: a sparkly dress with architectural intent, a boxy blazer to introduce a structural rhythm, and a squared bag: its symmetry and material purity mirroring the lacquered calm of Morellet’s planes. A large geometrical ring acts as the neon accent, a detail that, like in the artwork, punctuates the composition with light rather than noise. Geometry leads, and detail is deployed sparingly, like Morellet’s ribbon or the quiet intrusion of a neon tube.

The styling is not about replicating Morellet’s forms literally but embodying his ethos: restraint as sophistication, repetition as rhythm, and the unexpected (a color, a reflection, a gesture) as punctuation. In that way, the outfit does not accompany the artwork but it converses with it. It brings the viewer, the wearer, back into the visual field as participant. Like minimalism itself, it asks less to impress and more to distill.

In the end, this is fashion not as adornment, but as proposition: that to wear with intent is to compose. That a blazer can echo a grid, a ring can hold light, a dress can carry silence. That a woman moving through space, gallery, street, studio, can be as considered and impactful as any installation. And that’s the kind of minimalism I can get behind.