PARIS — French designer Charles de Vilmorin, creative director of Rochas, has been chosen as president of the style jury of the thirty eighth edition of the Hyères International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Fashion Accessories.

The announcement was made on Wednesday on the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, “a real place of fashion, with magnificent exhibitions” corresponding to the recently closed one on Schiaparelli, said festival president Pascale Mussard.

“However it’s also fashion week and all houses presenting during this week actually have someone who passed through the Villa Noailles, was a winner or a finalist,” she continued, thanking festival founder Jean-Pierre Blanc and his team for “having the religion in and the attention on” emerging talents. 

The accessories jury will headed by London-based jeweler Alan Crocetti, who recently collaborated with Parisian label Ami, while Berlin-based Dominican American photographer and dancer Luis Alberto Rodriguez, a winner on the thirty second edition of the festival, will lead the photography one.

A significant highlight of this yr’s edition, slated for Oct. 12 to fifteen, will likely be the one hundredth anniversary of the creation of the Villa Noailles, the festival’s historic modernist home built by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, patrons of the humanities and friends to plenty of influential artists.

Calling the festival a family that owes much to Marie-Laure de Noailles, Mussard described her as someone “who had what it takes to create: freedom, an appetite for all times, an eye fixed on the smallest thing and a taste for party and for creation in all its expression, even when it ruffles feathers.”

This anniversary will likely be an ideal opportunity to “remind that for [the couple], it wasn’t fashion designers on one side and artists on the opposite, but all artists they loved were a part of the identical family,” Blanc had said at a 2022 conference teasing the year-long celebration that can include an hour-long opera performed through the festival.

This yr’s exhibition on the villa in Hyères will see Marie-Laure de Noailles’ wardrobe revisited by outstanding fashion houses and emerging designers, under the scientific and historic curation of Émilie Hammen, who heads the “Chanel and le19M Chair in Fashion Savoir-Faire” on the Institut Français de la Mode.

If the youthful jury president got here as a surprise to the audience, Mussard and Blanc agreed that they’d considered what the late Villa Noailles owner would have done. “And he or she would have chosen someone unknown, someone whom she met on the road and connected with,” quipped Mussard.

“The creation of all three [jury presidents] celebrates our time,” said Blanc, lauding their generosity and enthusiasm in addition to the structure of juries which can be “very representative of what our professions are today.”

To pick out the style winners, de Vilmorin will find a way to count Antoine Gagey, managing director of Jean Paul Gaultier; Lesage artistic director Hubert Barrère; Numéro founder Babeth Djian; fashion critic and author Sophie Fontanel; TV presenter and actress Daphné Burki; photographer and director Alice Moitié, and singer-songwriters Flora Fishbach, Pierre de Maere and Bilal Hassani. As is traditional, the 2022 Première Vision Grand Prize winner, Finnish designer Jenny Hytönen, also will join the style jury.

The ten finalists of 2023 are Tiago Bessa (Portugal), Alec Rhys Bizby (England), Fengyuan Dai (France), Igor Dieryck (Belgium), Petra Fagerstrom (Sweden), Leevi Ikäheimo (Finland), Jung Eun Lee (South Korea), Norman Mabire-Larguier (France), Bo Kwon Min (South Korea) and Marc Sanz Pey (Spain).

They will likely be competing for the Première Vision Grand Prize, the primary fashion prize; the 19M Chanel Métiers d’Art prize; the Mercedes-Benz sustainable collection prize, and the “Atelier des Matières” prize introduced in 2022.

Created under the stewardship of Chanel and supported by the “Atelier des Matières,” a social and environmental responsibility initiative working to offer recent life to unused materials and unsold finished merchandise, the 19M Chanel prize awards a choice of fabrics and leathers value 10,000 euros to the designer who will impress the jury using upcycled materials.

The alternative was made based on “creativity, their uniqueness and the best way they might implant themselves in an actual world, in an actual industry,” said de Vilmorin. For the following six months, the finalists should “go for it, not ask themselves too many questions” in the event that they wish to impress the jury, he added.

Considered a serious launchpad for designers since its creation in 1985, the Hyères festival has helped raise the profiles of talents corresponding to Viktor & Rolf; Saint Laurent artistic director Anthony Vaccarello; Paco Rabanne’s Julien Dossena, and Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh, who design men’s label Botter.

A recent endowment will likely be added to the primary fashion prize, in the shape of a yr of mentoring by recruitment specialist Stirling International.

To assist select the yr’s winning accessories, including a leather accessory for the Hermès prize, Crocetti’s jury includes GmbH and Trussardi co-creative director Serhat Işik; Chanel in-house model Amanda Sanchez; Beka Gvishiani, a fashion journalist best often called @stylenotcom on Instagram; Tyrone Dylan, dressmaker and stylist at Rick Owens; designer and sustainable consultant Maria Bernad; eyewear designer Mauricio Stein; stylist Laura Vandall; Nono Vazquez, fashion director of men’s magazine Icon El Paìs, and last yr’s grand prize winner Joshua Cannone.

Starting with this edition, the photography grand prize will likely be often called the 7L Photography Grand Prize, in a nod to the library founded by Karl Lagerfeld in Paris who said he loved it a lot “it is an element of [him].”

The winning photographer will subsequently receive its support for the creation and launch of a book edited by Editions 7L in addition to the production of an exhibition. Chanel can even support the winner with a 20,000-euro purse.

Tasked with evaluating the yr’s top photographers, Rodriguez can have alongside him a jury that features 2022 winner Rala Choi; Marni creative director Francesco Risso; Sansovino6’s founder and artistic director Edward Buchanan; photography curator and author Song Chong, and Adam Murray, an educational, curator and the pathway leader of Central Saint Martins’ Fashion Communication and Promotion MA program, amongst others.

Hassani, who represented France within the Eurovision Song Contest in 2019 and has broken barriers together with his androgynous appearance, said it was essential to support emerging design “because there’s nothing more essential than creation.”

“Most of all, we’ve to inform a complete generation that it’s allowed to create, to invent, that there remains to be something to create and to see tomorrow,” he continued. Describing candidates as “having a vision of a future that is definite,” he said that “it’s days like these that give hope.”