Actress Tilda Swinton looks, senses and sniffs her clothing collection during a performance in Amsterdam

‘Real Glamor’, that was not the silk dresses that attracted her mother for young Tilda Swinton. Those were the short, white costume jackets in which her father, a senior soldier, went to cocktail parties. That is what the actress tells on Saturday afternoon during A Biographical Wardrobe. Her preference for uniforms comes back several times in the performance, in which the Oscar winner, together with the French fashion historian and museum director Olivier, views Saillard’s pieces from her own wardrobe, feels and sometimes sniffs. And in which she brings out earlier carriers of outfits by adopting their characteristic postures.

In the coming days, Swinton, world famous from roles in arthouse pearls such as The Souvenir (2019) and We need to talk about Kevin (2011), Like her trips in blockbusters such as Marvelf film Doctor Strange (2016) Going with the public three more times through her memories and clothing. The collection has been transferred from her house in the Scottish Highlands, as part of the exhibition itself curated by herself Tilda Swinton – OngoingThat opens on Saturday evening in the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam.

Fashion icon

It is the first time that Eye asks an actor to curate an entire exhibition himself, although Swinton himself prefers the term performer. She herself was shivering at first when she received the request, she didn’t feel like a retrospective with highlights of her earlier roles. But she got Carte Blanche in terms of the interpretation and chose to emphasize how film is a collaborative art form. So she put together a program in which her long -term collaborations and friendships are central. Directors such as Jim Jarmusch, Luca Guadagnino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul made work on Swinton for the exhibition. And she will also talk to them in Eye in the coming months. In addition, there is a podcast and the performance that will be performed this weekend with Saillard. In addition to actress, Swinton is a fashion icon. She has been working with fashion house Chanel for years, which designs creations especially for her and sponsors the exhibition.

The atmosphere around the clothing racks that slowly fill during performance is that of an exclusive fashion show. The tickets, 85 euros each, were sold out in no time. Visitors are not only close to the items of clothing that Swinton turns out – and see the white dog hair on her favorite black kilt – but can also study the outfits of the other people in the front row.

Biographical Wardrobe is a variation on earlier performances that the duo did during the Paris Fashion Week in 2012 in which Swinton and Saillard “brought historical (clothing) pieces back to life” with Swinton that acts as a kind of moving “base”. Her collaborations with Saillard go like Swinton in her podcast tells “mainly and fundamentally about clothing, but also about ghosts, time and about the traces of lived lives.”

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Museum gloves

Remarkably, it delivers one of the most personal parts of the entire exhibition in Amsterdam. Soon you get the feeling that you witness two friends who dig a wardrobe together and recall memories. Lovingly, sometimes careful with white museum gloves, Swinton takes the dresses, hats, collars from white linen bags, boxes and boxes and shows them to the audience. Saillard asks questions, Swinton answers and gives a look at the context in which she grew up, an aristocratic Scottish family where the men had high military functions.

For example, the performance starts with a silk green dress that Swinton’s mother had made for her in 1978 when 17-year-old daughter for a cocktail party. An attempt “to make a lady of her,” says the actress. She herself saw the garment as “something for Margaret Thatcher”. Swinton wore the dress once, she says Saillard, at a party where she was presented all the time as “the daughter of the General”.

Aristocracy

The fact that the Swintons have been Scottish military elite for decades is underlined when a box with a beautifully decorated red tunic is entered. The men in Swinton’s family are ‘Archers’ or ‘The King’s Bodyguard for Scotland’. Swinton only knew the tunic from a painting on which her great -grandfather was wearing him, but then Queen Elizabeth died that he is only worn in the death or coronation of a monarch. The actress decided to temporarily leave her aristocratic environment around the age of eighteen. There was “too much consensus.”

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She does not respond to a question from Saillard about the elitist boarding school where she was from the age of ten, including with director Joanna Hogg and the later Princess Diana Spencer, and she was not critical about it. Not too long standing for a little less good, a family trait seems when Swinton pulls out the leg prosthesis with the slipper from her father. She reads a letter that he wrote home during the Second World War when his foot was dropped off as a 19-year-old. He is pretty light about it, although he thinks it is a shame that he is not the type of person who “prefers his head above his legs.”

After she lived in Africa for two years and for years in London, where she started her acting career in the films of Derek Jarman, Swinton returned to Scotland after the birth of her twins.

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Anyone who expected that the actress would mainly bring out clothing from her films or red runners is wrong. Although they will come by at the end – such as the short pink jacket with long orange skirt from Haider Ackermann that she was wearing during the premiere of Wes Andersons The French Dispatch (2021). But it is clear that Swinton wants to tell a clear story during the performance – just like in the composition of the exhibition. About the love and band she feels with her family and how it is visible in her clothing. Yes, the first neat dress she bought to put on to a premiere of Edward II (1991) It appears in her mother’s favorite fabric. And when she gave a speech on topics such as Gaza, Ukraine and Trump earlier this year, she was wearing a dark, close -fitting cloak inspired by her father’s military clothing, because she needed strength.

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