How a Comme des Garçons Superfan Became One of the World’s Biggest Fashion Collectors

PARIS — Somewhere in a warehouse in the east of France, one of the world’s biggest private collections of vintage fashion is waiting to see the light of day.

After three decades of stealthily amassing designs by everyone from Cristóbal Balenciaga to Comme des Garçons, fashion expert Jean-Denis Franoux is ready to lift the lid on his 25,000-piece treasure and share it with the world.

Thursday marks the kick-off of a three-day exhibition in Paris that doubles as the launch of Regarderobes, a project designed as a springboard for future exhibitions, a documentation center, and partnerships with sponsors on conservation and educational initiatives.

“I set up an endowment fund to preserve the collection because I’m an only child and I have no descendants. I started thinking, what will happen when I’m gone? So I created a structure to make sure it all stays together and doesn’t get scattered,” Franoux told WWD in an interview at his Paris apartment, crammed with cardboard boxes filled with rare pieces.

By comparison, Azzedine Alaïa — considered one of the world’s most prolific fashion collectors — had gathered 20,000 items by the time he passed away in 2017.  

Franoux has spent his career in fashion, starting in the early ’90s with Paris-based Japanese designer Yoneda Kasuko before launching his own label, which was sold at Henri Bendel in New York City and Maria Luisa in Paris. After shuttering the business in 2002, he taught at French fashion school Studio Berçot until its closure in 2023.

In parallel, Franoux freelanced for brands including Armor-lux and Zucca, and advised auction houses on important sales, such as the 2005 auction of the Paul Poiret estate.

Growing up near Nancy in eastern France, he caught the collecting bug early, though his first passion was fragrance. By the time Franoux reached his teens, he had amassed more than 4,000 bottles, establishing a blueprint for the way he would collect clothes.

“The common denominator is the serial aspect. I wasn’t interested in miniatures or giant display bottles as much as the full commercial range. In those days, perfume would come in sizes ranging from 7 ml to 1 liter, and I wanted them all,” he recalled.

“That’s something that’s stuck with me, because today, when I like a collection theme, I want every model, every color and every material,” Franoux added.

A Secret Compulsion

Born into a family of industrialists that own a construction conglomerate, he started developing an interest in fashion in the early ’80s, becoming an avid reader of magazines.

A photograph in a 1982 issue of French Elle caught his attention. “It was a group of women in black, which I found very strange, but even more enigmatic was the name next to it: Comme des Garçons,” he said, noting that at the time, most fashion labels carried the name of their founder. That discovery marked the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Rei Kawakubo’s designs.

Some 20 years later, Franoux would acquire a skirt from Comme des Garçons’ fall 1983 collection on eBay, triggering a collecting frenzy that has seen him snap up an estimated 5,000 pieces from the Japanese label, which form the core of his collection, alongside a sizable number of Yohji Yamamoto and John Galliano creations.

For the better part, he was driven by irrational instinct and an almost pathological urge to acquire complete sets. The collection spilled over from his warehouse to his former apartment above his current abode, which is so full of boxes, he briefly moved to a nearby hotel before buying the space below.

“I was a little compulsive in my buying habits, but I didn’t really have the time to structure and organize anything,” he said.

“Nobody knew about it, except for a handful of auctioneers where I ended up becoming a good customer. A lot of other merchants thought I was buying on behalf of Azzedine Alaïa,” he continued.

For a long time, he saw the collection as a succession of individual pieces without a guiding theme. “At a certain point, I said to myself, ‘Yes, OK, now there are enough pieces for it to have a meaning.’ And that’s when I decided it should also benefit others,” he said.

Franoux has selected some 50 silhouettes for the inaugural exhibition, open until Saturday at a private gallery in the Marais district of Paris, by appointment via geoffrey@prconsultingparis.net.

A Forensic Approach

The looks are designed to showcase both his taste and his forensic approach to acquisitions, with complete looks from Comme des Garçons’ fall 1984 and fall 1986 collections, Yamamoto’s fall 1984 and fall 1985 lines, and Galliano’s fall 1985 and fall 1987 collections.

The depth of the collection makes it a precious new resource for museum curators, fashion scholars and brand heritage departments alike.

Franoux peels away the tissue paper inside one box to reveal a jeweled Judy Blame cap created for “The Ludic Game,” Galliano’s first runway show at London Fashion Week, where models famously threw fresh fish into the audience.

While an evening gown from Galliano’s controversial “Homeless” collection for Christian Dior recently went under the hammer for 663,000 euros, Franoux is always more interested in designers’ early output, with a distinct emphasis on commercial pieces over runway and red carpet prototypes.

“It makes me bristle that someone like Jean Paul Gaultier, for example, is reduced to his conical bras, tattoo T-shirts and sailor tops, because he did so much more, and much better things than that,” he said.

Franoux also loves to pair items, whether variations on a theme or designs from different eras that echo each other in terms of color, shape or technique — such as a riding outfit from the late 19^th century and a fall 1992 Martin Margiela coat. The exhibition also includes archival pieces from Hermès, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, Pierre Balmain, Chloé and Gaultier.

Franoux shares with Alaïa not just his passion for collecting, but also his obsession with garment construction. His first acquisition was a type of 19^th century women’s coat known as a “visite,” and he would frequently pick apart pieces to understand how they were made.  

“I like things that look off-kilter,” he said. “My technique was to take apart one half of the garment and keep the other half intact, that way you can see how the flat pattern translates into 3D. It’s like a repertoire of shapes. I still have whole boxes of pieces of clothing.”

He’s also fond of lesser-known designers, dropping names like post-war couture house Mad Carpentier and ’80s French designer France Andrevie.

Astonishingly, Franoux is able to pull up within seconds any given look from the thousands stocked on his iPad, thanks to a photographic memory that allows items to remain fresh in his mind, even as they languish inside boxes — sometimes for decades.

Watching him unpack a pristine black fall 1982 Comme des Garçons sweater feels like seeing a rare archeological treasure come to light. “I hadn’t seen it for 20 years,” he beamed. “I’m quite proud of this one. It’s simply magnificent.”