Hyères Festival makes a new start with its 36th edition

Hyères (France) - On Thursday evening, for the 36th consecutive year, the International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Accessories took place in the Villa Noailles, in the town of Hyères in the South East of France.

A little over a week after Paris Fashion Week, the fashion world gathers again under the sun of the Côte d’Azur to attend what is commonly known as the Hyères Festival.

The event will announce the winners of the different categories on Sunday - fashion, fashion accessories and photography - selecting from 30 finalists in all.

But before knowing the results of the competition, guests can attend various activities, including a masterclass with Louise Trotter (the artistic director of Lacoste and president of the fashion jury), a participatory workshop with French embroidery house Lesage, a fashion show, a visit to the showroom, as well as concerts and outdoor film screenings.

Hyères Festival: around 5,000 people expected this weekend

This year, the number of visitors is important. “We’re going to get close to 5,000 people over the weekend,” Jean-Pierre Blanc, the festival’s founder, told FashionUnited.

Of that number, 2,000 will attend the fashion shows on Friday and Saturday night, including 200 journalists and 250 students who will discover the avant-garde and youthful fashion that has made the annual event famous.

Since its creation in 1986, the Hyères festival has seen its aura grow - but then came Covid-19. While the event still took place in 2020, the atmosphere was noticeably different. For Jean-Pierre Blanc, it was “an in-between festival”.

“Until 2019, we were rather on a strong rise, and now we’re starting again,” he said. “It is therefore a rebirth, a new beginning. We will make an assessment after the festival, but in view of the signals, I am rather confident.”

This 36th edition has a special quality to it. Jean-Pierre Blanc explains: “We tried to build an edition that shows joy, emotions, youth. We played a lot on that. And then there is a theme that was born around a quote from the American writer Edith Wharton who said in the 1920s: “Hyères so gold, so full of flowers”.

This joy of which the founder speaks was already palpable at the inauguration on Thursday. As well as being international, the festival is also friendly and convivial; it gathers a large audience, made of anonymous and known personalities as well as many regulars whose happy reunion and cheerful chatter gave the festival last night the air of summer camps.

This is certainly the success of the event: despite an authority supported by prestigious partners - including LVMH, Chanel, Hermes and Kering - the meeting retains a good-natured atmosphere and thus the freshness so sought after by the fashion world.

This article was originally published on FashionUnited.FR before being translated to English.