T Magazine: Letter from France | In Lyon, Artists and Designers Light Up the City

Lyon, France's third-largest city, was made for Christmas.

Like an average-looking woman who becomes beautiful under candlelight, the city becomes radiant for four days every December during the Festival of Lights. The event, which draws between three and four million visitors, shows off Lyon's unique approach to lighting, a pointillist style that uses small spotlights to highlight elaborate decorations and details of buildings for dramatic effect.

This year's festival invited Paris fashion designers to make magic, not on young models' bodies, but on old buildings. Jean-Charles de Castelbajac created a mystical Garden of Eden called "Lost Paradise" among the columns and arcades of the courtyard of the 17th century City Hall. His son, Guilhem, a photographer living in New York, projected a constellation of stars on the ground. The lingerie designer Chantal Thomass brought springtime to the Place de la Bourse with "Serenade," a 26-foot sculpture of a rose bouquet that was lit up with projections of her favorite flowers and tied in lace and satin ribbons.

For a show called "Dress Code," the facade of the Saint-Paul train station was dressed in illuminated images of clothing in homage to Lyon's onetime role as the center of Europe's silk industry. To make a new tunnel below the Croix-Rousse quarter, the old silk-weaving area, more attractive to pedestrians and bicyclists, it was permanently lit with constantly changing, projected videos of subjects both real (dancers and athletes) and imaginary (giant Technicolor flowers moving in the grass).

The festival highlighted the busiest season of the year for art and design in the city. It overlapped with the Lyon Biennale, which has brought together the works of artists from around the world every two years since 1991. In addition to works exhibited throughout the Lyon area, the Biennale, which opened in September and closes Jan. 5, includes art projects, conferences and workshops in public and private venues, including Lyon's troubled suburbs.

Several days before the festival, the city's Center for the History of the Resistance and Deportation opened an exhibition dedicated to women's fashion under Vichy rule during the four years of German occupation in the 1940s. The exhibition, which continues until April 13 next year, gathers hundreds of objects, including clothing, shoes, film posters and fashion magazines, to show how local tailors, dressmakers and shoemakers coped with the scarcity of materials like wool, cotton and leather. Suits and jackets were crafted from upholstery fabric. Shoes were made with uppers of straw, cloth, ribbon or cellulose, with heels of wood or cork. Hats were made of cellophane. Nylon from parachutes was recycled into nightgowns, electrical wiring woven into belts. Dresses got shorter to save on fabric. Buttons, ribbons and lace, which were not rationed, were liberally used. New fabrics like rayon were introduced.

"Dressing well was a form of resistance," said Evelyne Haguenauer, a deputy mayor of Lyon, who is Jewish, as we toured the show. "It was the resistance of women against sadness, and the resistance of the artisans — so many of them were Jewish — who struggled to keep their crafts alive."

Jeanne Guillin, who is 86 and lived in Lyon through the war, recalled how she and her sister drew black seams up the back of their calves and sponged their calves with flesh-colored foundation to give the illusion that they were wearing stockings. "The trick worked — except when it rained and the foundation started running," she said.

These days, the Village des Créateurs, created by the city in 2001, serves as Lyon's epicenter of style and design. It represents 70 local designers. Situated in the 19th century pedestrian Passage Thiaffait, in the heart of the once-derelict Croix-Rousse quarter, it contains multipurpose workshops, studios and retail shops.

Sophie Guyot, 39, a member who works just outside the village, represents the bridge between the style of old and new Lyon. A former student of textile design and a winner of the Atelier d'Art award for best young designer, she has worked with silk for the last five years. She buys giant bolts of white silk organza from China, as well as more costly locally made jacquard silk, to create one-of-a-kind and limited-edition dresses, ensembles, scarves and shawls. She hand-dyes all the silks herself with vegetable dyes in a tiny kitchen-turned-laboratory in the back of her atelier and retail space. Her specialty is to replicate the silk pleating traditionally done in Lyon. She also designs silk and cashmere scarves that are made for her by an old, family-owned, Lyon textile-making operation. "Sophie is carrying on the idea of Lyons savoir-faire," said Isabelle Gleize, director of the Village des Créateurs. "This is what the project is destined to do — to help young designers dare to live their passions."

Other designers working in the Village include Boris Fuchy, a fashion designer who works only in black silk; Sabine Orlandini, an architect-turned-ceramicist who creates usable ceramic sculptures; and Andrea Vaggione, an Argentina-born jewelry maker who works behind a screen onsite and whose signature pieces include pendants and rings in anodized aluminum with moveable pieces.

Talent also turns up in less expected places in Lyon. A few blocks away from the Village is Twig 7, a vintage furniture shop with designs from the 1950s on. Its walls are hung with constructivist pastels by Alain Rodary, a local painter. "You never know when you'll find something new and wonderful in this city," said Emmanuel Bojon, who opened the shop six years ago and knows Rodary well. "He's waiting to be discovered."

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