inside tilda swinton's world of garments and artistic fellowship

in tilda swinton’s performance, garments become living archives

Tilda Swinton unfolds a faded pink cardigan in front of the audience at Onassis Ready in Athens. It belonged to her father. She still wears it. Nearby sits a kilt still covered in the white hairs of one of her Springer Spaniels, which has since passed. Olivier Saillard, the French fashion historian guiding the performance, listens as the British artist wonders aloud whether a museum would preserve the traces of fur still clinging to the kilt. Saillard answers no. The hairs should remain. ‘I don’t want to clean this kilt,’ Swinton says. Across A Biographical Wardrobe, the artists treat clothing as emotional evidence.

Presented as part of the wider exhibition Ongoing at Onassis Ready, the live performance by Swinton and Saillard turns garments into living archives of memory, grief, kinship, and artistic collaboration. Staged inside the Onassis Foundation’s newly opened arts space in Athens, a former plastics factory transformed into a raw site for artistic experimentation, the project gathers decades of Swinton’s creative life through films, installations, photographs, and performances made with some of her closest collaborators, including Pedro Almodóvar, Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Jim Jarmusch, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tim Walker, and the late Derek Jarman. Yet despite the names surrounding the exhibition, Ongoing resists the mythology of singular artistic genius. Instead, Swinton frames creativity as an act of fellowship.

A Biographical Wardrobe, Tilda Swinton – Olivier Saillard | all images © Andreas Simopoulos for Onassis Stegi

preservation gives way to lived memory

The performance plays out almost like an intimate séance. Garments hang suspended in space without mannequins, hovering like absent bodies while Swinton narrates the lives attached to them. A velvet dress sewn by her mother’s seamstress. A christening robe worn by generations of her family since 1896. Military jackets belonging to her father and grandfather. A Lacroix suit repeatedly reincarnated across decades of films, portraits, and public appearances. The stories are told casually, humorously, and sometimes devastatingly. Swinton recalls being told by her older brother at age three that she looked ‘pretty…disgusting’ in a dress she loved. Later, speaking of inherited femininity, she shrugs gently: ‘We can all wear them. We can dress up as whatever we want.’

One garment carries scraps of paper still tucked inside its pockets. Another bears scratches deliberately added by designer Alber Elbaz after an accident damaged the fabric before the Oscars. Swinton repeatedly returns to the idea that objects become meaningful precisely because they continue to live alongside the body rather than being sealed away from it. ‘We can preserve dresses,’ Olivier Saillard notes at one point, ‘but we cannot preserve movement, gesture.’

That refusal of static preservation shapes Ongoing, the wider exhibition surrounding the live performance inside Onassis Ready, a project that resists the retrospective format, perceiving the past instead as an unfinished collective of relationships still evolving. During the press conference, Swinton recalls initially rejecting the invitation to create the exhibition altogether. ‘I was not ready to close the story,’ Tilda Swinton explains. The idea of assembling old clips, costumes, and relics from past projects felt incompatible with the way she understands artistic life, so she proposed a cluster of collaborations still actively generating new work. Everything inside Ongoing resists closure. Swinton describes the exhibition as ‘a seedbed of work,’ comparing it to ‘a kitchen midden’ filled with fragments, scraps, and ongoing conversations. Many of the installations are newly commissioned specifically for the exhibition, while others remain deliberately unfinished or unstable in form. The project is designed to evolve as it travels internationally, accumulating new collaborators and works over time.

Swinton and Saillard turn garments into living archives of memory, grief, kinship, and artistic collaboration

the red thread is the kitchen table

The philosophy of artistic collaboration that stays at the core of the exhibition feels increasingly radical in a cultural landscape organized around branding, isolation, and authorship. Tilda Swinton describes spending recent years traveling globally in her role as Chanel’s arts and culture ambassador, speaking with younger artists about their anxieties surrounding creative life. Unexpectedly, she found the same concerns surfacing repeatedly across cities and continents, particularly around social isolation, mental health, and the pressure to function as an individual creative commodity. ‘You’re encouraged,’ she says, ‘to brand yourself as a commodity.’

For the artist, Ongoing becomes a response to that condition. Throughout the exhibition and performance, she repeatedly returns to the collaborative environments that shaped her own practice beginning in the 1980s alongside artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman and a wider creative community built around co-authorship. ‘Prepare to go to the set as if you’re going to a party,’ Jarman once told his collaborators. Swinton still describes that ethos as foundational to the way she works.

The artist insists that the relationships generating the work matter far more, as she describes the exhibition through the metaphor of a tree. ‘The relationship is the trunk of the tree,’ Tilda Swinton explains. ‘The particular conversation that comes out of the relationship is the branch. The film, or the performance, or the article, is just the leaf. It’s very disposable. It’s not the most important thing. It’s the process that’s the most important bit.’

Again and again, Ongoing returns to the kitchen table as the real site of creation. Swinton describes decades-long conversations unfolding over cups of tea with Jarman, Joanna Hogg, Luca Guadagnino, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul long before projects formally existed. The films emerge almost secondarily from these sustained exchanges. ‘The red thread is the kitchen table,’ she shares.

staged inside the Onassis Foundation’s newly opened arts space in Athens

derek jarman’s presence lingers through shared objects

Nowhere is this philosophy more moving than in Swinton’s recollections of Derek Jarman, the filmmaker who launched her screen career and remained one of her closest artistic companions until his death in 1994. At one point during A Biographical Wardrobe, she lifts a simple sweatshirt shared between them for years. ‘At any time, one of us would wear it, wash it, put it in the airing cupboard, and then the other one would take it,’ she remembers. The sweatshirt still carries a small tear beneath the arm. She has never repaired it.

Jarman’s presence moves through A Biographical Wardrobe like a ghostly current. Swinton describes accompanying him to Dungeness as he searched for a place to build what would become Prospect Cottage and its now legendary garden. She remembers the fear surrounding the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s, when HIV was spoken about as a death sentence and governments responded with exclusion rather than care. In her telling, Jarman’s openness about his diagnosis became an act of radical dignity. ‘He brought people together,’ the actress notes. ‘He gave the status of HIV dignity.’

Yet even here, the whole project resists monumentalizing grief. It lingers in gestures, routines, fabrics, and shared objects. Swinton repeatedly refers to the exhibition as being ‘full of ghosts,’ though not in a mournful sense. The ghosts inhabiting Ongoing remain active presences, collaborators still participating in ongoing conversations. Asked how she continues to communicate with artists she has lost, including Jarman and Béla Tarr, she responds naturally: ‘I’m in constant conversation with them.’

The reconstructed environments in the exhibition hold this sensation of suspended time. One installation recreates Flat 19, the London apartment Swinton inhabited throughout much of the 1980s and early 1990s, reconstructed alongside longtime collaborator Joanna Hogg almost entirely from memory. Swinton refused to enter the completed reconstruction until shortly before the exhibition opened in Amsterdam. When she finally stepped inside, she described the experience as a literal return. ‘That is not a set,’ Tilda Swinton emphasizes. ‘That is the flat.’ She later describes the apartment as ‘a chrysalis,’ the site where she transformed from recent graduate into artist, collaborator, and eventually mother.

softness as a form of artistic resistance

Both the Ongoing exhibition and the A Bibliographical Wardrobe performance repeatedly insist on the importance of maintaining vulnerability, tenderness, and collaborative dependency within systems that increasingly reward speed, productivity, and self-branding. Swinton’s reflections on fashion are particularly revealing in this regard. Rather than treating the red carpet as a glamorous spectacle, she describes it as performance, labor, and choreography. ‘I want to feel like I’m representing a team,’ she explains.

Even disaster becomes collective improvisation. Recalling an Oscars dress damaged moments before departure, Swinton remembers designer Alber Elbaz responding with experimentation and creativity, deliberately scratching the fabric further until the flaw became integral to the garment itself. Elsewhere, she speaks about preserving inherited clothing not as museum objects but as usable extensions of living memory. Her grandfather’s coat remains meaningful not because it belongs to family history, but because, as she puts it, ‘it’s still a really warm coat.’

Again and again, the whole project rejects institutional perfection in favor of traces left behind through use. Garments hold dog hair, tears, stains, creases, receipts, notes, and signs of wear. The body never fully disappears from them. Tilda Swinton reflects on why clothing becomes such a powerful vessel for ancestral memory. ‘It’s the usefulness of them where the spirit lies,’ she says. ‘These are not museum pieces.’ That same philosophy extends outward toward artistic life itself. Swinton proposes that the most meaningful creative practices are those capable of remaining porous, unfinished, collective, and alive.

Near the end of Tilda Swinton and Olivier Saillard’s performance, A Biographical Wardrobe, the British artist recalls a line from Memoria, her film with Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Asked what death feels like, a character responds simply: ‘It’s nothing more. I just stopped.’ Yet throughout Ongoing, almost nothing truly stops. Conversations continue. Collaborations expand. Ghosts remain present. Clothes are reworn. Old friendships generate new work. Somewhere, still, people sit around kitchen tables imagining what might come next.

Ongoing gathers photographs, archival materials, films, and installations | image © Margarita Yoko Nikitaki for Onassis Stegi

The Maybe (1995)

inside tilda swinton’s world of garments and artistic fellowship

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