In Arles, bridesmaids are wearing red in homage to Christian Lacroix. The Provençal city of blond-coloured stone and magnificent Roman ruins has embraced its prodigal son's return with zeal. Lacroix is back after a 20-year absence to dress the street lights in pink and curate an exhibition of his couture and his roots in a Renaissance palace across the Rhône from his boyhood home. It's the same palace where he played truant from school and dreamed of becoming an artist. Now he's created a jewel box of those dreams, a rich visual autobiography. Beside the paintings of minotaurs, matadors, Arlesian ladies in traditional silks and satins, and the Picassos he admired long ago is the exuberant haute couture he later created in their image.
Arles is a fiery, erotic, fascinating town with a lot of edge. "Little Rome", as some call it, claims to have France's most beautiful women. Teenagers canoodle in the Roman ruins, writers, translators and editors come and go from Actes Sud and Editions Philippe Picquier publishers, and students from the national university of photography and Europe's best film animation college mingle in its lovely squares with winegrowers and farmers.
Visiting Arles is like going to Rome without the expense, the pollution, or the sore feet. Two hours of strolling is enough to embrace everything from its renown as a mecca for artists and bullfighting capital to its history as the Roman empire's biggest city outside Italy.
Over the summer, Lacroix curated its international photography festival, which is to photography what Cannes is to cinema. The city was full of fashionistas and giants of contemporary photography, and friends of Lacroix's such as Peter Lindbergh, Paolo Roversi and Françoise Huguier.
Lacroix's peek into his past at the Musée Reattu is now the main attraction. With typical joie de vivre , and pieces from his collections, some of them new to the public, he illustrates a theme of hair, folds and the body. The show has been extended until December 31. It is Lacroix's third major curatorial effort in France this year, and his most personal. One can only hope it travels to London's V&A or the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute in New York.
Lacroix is often in Arles; he has a home here. He tells stories of learning cross-stitch in school and swallowing paint, of watching gypsies and novilleros , the apprentice bullfighters so much a part of the town's culture and of going to parties hosted by former madams. In a way, he's never left: his 1987 debut collection in Paris was entirely Arles-inspired drama, a lot of tight bodices and flamenco ruffles. I am forever chasing the elusive lady of Arles, he says.
At the Musée Reattu, he drapes one mannequin in black embroidery of matadors and priests over white satin and belts it in red. Next door, his rose gowns with pinched waists reference the costumes of local dressmakers in an 18th-century painting on the wall. Nearby are three of Lacroix's famous "poof" skirts, including a heavy brown satin number with an olive-green bow. It's inspiring to see a Provençal chalk study of folds next to two of Lacroix's airy gowns of torqued, puffy white silk, suspended from the ceiling like clouds.
If you wander over to the Roman amphitheatre, you will see the matadors who inspire Lacroix. They fight there often, casting long black shadows on the sable sand. This two-story oval seating 12,000 is just higher than the city's red roofs. At Easter, a major feria , with bullfights and parades, will be held here before thousands of spectators.
I love to visit the Camargue, 20 minutes away, the 346,000-acre salt marsh of cowboys, flamingoes and rice farming that gives Arles its connection to the sea and the bulls for its ring. The beautiful grillwork on its doors and church steeples comes from a tradition fostered by bull branding. Lacroix has used the Camargue cowboys' symbol - a heart, a cross and a bull's head with horns, as an elegant motif for years.
A pleasant place to stay is the Calendal Hotel, near the amphitheatre and arena. Its staff is young and the décor modern. Then there's the Grand Hotel Nord-Pinus, where Picasso stayed. Cocteau, Hemingway and celebrity matadors hung out there in the 1950s and 1960s when it was owned by a clown and a cabaret singer. Cool and stylish, it's a shrine to the tauromachie .
Outside, a statue of poet Frederic Mistral stands guard over a lively square next to the café that Vincent Van Gogh immortalised, its yellow awnings glowing at night. Yet Arlesians didn't like Van Gogh: they considered him odd and petitioned to put him in a sanatorium. A frank lot, wiry and earthy, they prefer Lacroix, and they are the figures who haunt his every ruffle, cap, ribbon, red, pink, violet, gold and black confection.
Arles is looking to the future too: pharmaceutical heiress and photography collector Maja Hoffmann is giving the town an avant-garde cultural centre by Frank Gehry, to be built in the old railway works. Like Lacroix, Hoffmann is from Arles. Her gift will give Arles a leg-up compared with other major European centres on the contemporary art circuit. The giant studio will host publishers Actes Sud, conservation studios and Hoffmann's photography foundation Luma.
