Jeanne Vicerial Turns Thread Into Sculpture

Straddling clothing, sculpture and scientific research, Jeanne Vicerial (b. 1991) has forged a singular, almost hypnotic body of work. Her black silhouettes — knotted, braided, organic — have made her one of the most sought-after artists working today. A sure sign of her ascent: in 2023, the Centre Pompidou acquired Mue (1/2) no. 3, a work featured in the exhibition Suivez le fil ! Design et textile at the Hôtel des Arts in Toulon.

Yet nothing in Vicerial’s early path pointed toward contemporary art. Hers has been an unconventional trajectory, taking her through fashion — including a stint with celebrated designer Hussein Chalayan — costume and technical garment construction. That circuitous route is precisely what gives her work its distinctive character today. Her arresting sculptures still carry the memory of clothing, but now tell a different story: of the ways bodies are shaped, protected, constrained and repaired.

The Body as a Starting Point

A few hours by train from Paris, Jeanne Vicerial welcomes us to her studio in a small village tucked into the Loue Valley, on the fringes of the Jura. Narrow lanes and weathered stone give the village a timeless feel. Set in an old house with a sprawling garden, her studio seems made for contemplation: a light-filled room lined with neatly stacked spools of thread, sewing machines, tools, mannequins, black cords and plants. Here and there, works in progress hover like half-formed human presences, lending the space an almost monastic stillness.

Soft-spoken and dressed, as she often is, in voluminous black, Vicerial moves effortlessly from childhood memories to reflections on the textile industry, weaving in questions of femininity, hybridity and ecology along the way. As a child, she drew female figures and dreamed up imaginary collections of children’s clothes. She still has “tons of drawings” from those years — and remembers wanting to become a costume designer. “I was fascinated by the way clothes could turn people into characters,” she recalls.

During the two years she spent earning her degree in crafts and design at Lycée Paul-Poiret in Paris, Vicerial was introduced to a highly technical approach to clothing: made-to-measure construction, with the body as its exacting measure. “If you were off by two millimeters, you started over. It was incredibly hands-on, artisanal work.” She then went on to study fashion design at Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (Ensad). “Suddenly I was working with mood boards. My two courses might as well have been a century apart: made-to-measure on one side, ready-to-wear on the other,” she says.

Why choose between them? “The Rana Plaza collapse was a turning point,” she says. In April 2013, when the building collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, more than a thousand garment workers producing clothes for major Western brands in appalling conditions lost their lives. The disaster shocked the public and sent the industry scrambling. “I began to seriously question my role as a designer, and whether I wanted to keep making clothes at all. The body became central to my thinking, alongside a growing sense that the fashion industry was profoundly broken.”

The body became central to my thinking, alongside a growing sense that the fashion industry was profoundly broken.

Jeanne Vicerial

Out of that reckoning came the Clinique vestimentaire in 2014: an intangible studio conceived as a hybrid space for research and experimentation, where clothing is no longer a fashion product but a living material conceived in relation to the human body. “A fictional, collective space where clothing could be imagined from the body itself: the skin, the spine, the weave of muscle.” Using spools of thread discarded by the textile industry, Vicerial began creating anatomy-inspired pieces from a single continuous thread, leaving no waste behind — works that resemble shed skins or wearable X-rays of the body.

Weaving in Three Dimensions

This is how “tricotissage” was born: using a single continuous thread, Vicerial draws forms in space, following the contours of the body without cutting the material or leaving any waste behind. Somewhere between knitting, lacework and sculpture, the technique allows her to create made-to-measure pieces conceived as organic extensions of the body — an approach that brings ecological concerns and craftsmanship into a broader critique of industrial fashion. “This one is the Great Gladiator,” she says, pointing to one of her works. “I created his head from illustrations I found in old medical books. My father was an osteopath, so we had lots of diagrams of meridians around the house. I like bringing different ways of understanding medicine together.”

I draw in three dimensions. 

Jeanne Vicerial

Vicerial even works with surgical needles and an IV stand, which allows her to construct her pieces in midair. “Really, I draw in three dimensions,” she says simply. The idea would become the subject of her PhD dissertation (École des Mines, EnsadLab, in collaboration with the École Normale Supérieure), which she completed in 2019. As part of her research, she developed a machine capable of automating the process. “My prototype could do in seven minutes what used to take me seven hours by hand.”

The implications were significant: made-to-measure clothing could be produced locally, with no material waste — garments designed to adapt to the body itself. Vicerial calls it, with a smile, prêt-à-mesure, a play on prêt-à-porter and sur-mesure. The idea caught the attention of several manufacturers and ultimately led to a patent.

“What’s the point of making more clothes when we already have enough to dress ourselves for the next 300 years?” Vicerial says, disillusioned with the fashion industry’s relentless drive for profit. It is one of the world’s most polluting industries, producing some 100 billion garments a year, according to Ademe, France’s agency for ecological transition.

Beyond Clothing

Long associated with women’s work and the domestic sphere, textile practices have historically been kept at the margins of fine art. Vicerial belongs to a generation of artists reclaiming these techniques and pushing them into the realms of sculpture, research and installation. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, she took up a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome, where she worked under the guidance of actress Tilda Swinton and fashion historian Olivier Saillard. It marked another decisive shift in her practice. “I wanted to work from the sculptures there, to study their muscles. I became interested in making armor for those Venuses with wet drapery, whose fabric always looks as though it has just happened to fall that way.”

It gives me a way to explore everything — the body, fashion, women, art history — without having to make clothes. There’s a real freedom in that.

Jeanne Vicerial

Gradually, textile design and its industrial applications gave way to a more sculptural, experimental practice, one in which clothing becomes an exoskeleton. “It gives me a way to explore everything — the body, fashion, women, art history — without having to make clothes. There’s a real freedom in that.”