ELISABETH DE SENNEVILLE ARCHIVES OF A VISIONARY

MODE

AUCTION

MONDAY, JUNE 22, 2026
, 7:30 PM (PARIS TIME)

EXHIBITION

VISIT

Fri. JUNE 12

, MON. JUNE 15

SET UP A MEETING

PENELOPE’S auction house celebrates a free-spirited pioneer: Elisabeth de Senneville. Since the 1970s, she has imposed a singular vision, at the crossroads of fashion, art and design, driven by a precocious intuition for technologies and new textile languages.

130 archives, reunited here, reveal a total work, where clothes, drawings, objects and documents interact to compose the portrait of a visionary designer.

Élisabeth de Senneville launched her solo career in 1974, at a time of profound renewal of forms and ideas. The breath of freedom inherited from the late 1960s opened up an unprecedented field of experimentation, the potential of which she immediately grasped. From the outset, she distinguished herself through a singular approach, rejecting any hierarchy between disciplines and asserting a global practice, where the garment dialogues with the image, the object and the environment.

Trained at Dior and then Printemps, she mastered the techniques before breaking free. Her silhouettes, apparently simple, emphasize comfort, fullness and freedom of movement, often inspired by Asia. They become the medium for radical work, in which the garment is transformed into a veritable space for visual experimentation.

Fascinated by emerging technologies, she explored materials unheard of in fashion at the time: latex, neoprene, perforated aluminum, Tyvek and industrial textiles. She imagined garments capable of interacting with their environment, anticipating the omnipresence of digital technology as early as the late 1970s, asserting that “the screen will be our third eye”.

On these pure forms, she multiplies her interventions: ink drawings, silkscreen prints, photocopies hijacked in the spirit of Copy Art, fragments of comic strips or the press. Surfaces become narrative, almost painterly. From art history to popular culture, his eye captures, transforms and reinvents reality.

Designer, researcher and artist in one, Élisabeth de Senneville sees creation as an ongoing process, a continuous construction. “For me, creation is a permanent obsession; to achieve the astonishment of never having done it before, that’s the goal of my life as an artist.

The archives gathered here bear witness to this. Women’s, men’s and children’s clothing, runway pieces, technical textiles, drawings, paintings, objects and documents make up a rare ensemble, in which each element contributes to a single narrative. A layered, visionary work, whose resonance is strikingly evident today.