Daphné Bürki will dress the opening ceremony

Thomas Jolly asked the presenter and television host to choose with him and coordinate the costume designers for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris on July 26.

JUntil July 26, the day of the much-anticipated opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, Thomas Jolly will not stop telling us – little by little! – the surprises. Who would never have thought that the journalist, presenter and famous television host Daphné Bürki, 44 years old, and born (of noble lineage) Daphné de Marin de Montmarin, would be responsible for the costumes for the festivities? We had forgotten that the warm host with the thick bangs and long red hair of the cultural daily Culturebox, the show (with Raphël Yem), on France 4, had initially trained not only at the School of Fine Arts but also at the Fleuri-Delaporte fashion design school.

She thus began a career as a stylist at Dior – on the corsetry side – with John Galliano. And it was as a fashion columnist that she began her long and flourishing TV career on Canal+ in 2004, alongside Maïtena Biraben, then Bruce Toussaint. When he was invited to his show, Thomas Jolly was immediately seduced by Daphné Bürki’s sharing and enthusiastic spirit and her skills in fashion. Once appointed artistic director of the Olympic Games, he immediately offered to choose with him and coordinate the creators who would work on the ceremony: “Paris is a fashion mecca for the whole world, to diverse and varied stylists, he explains. So I didn’t want there to be just one for the ceremonies but several. I needed someone to guide me. Daphné Bürki has a very keen eye for young French creation, which she knows wonderfully, loves and defends. She was perfect. She introduced me to a lot of young talent that I was unaware of. »

Between fifteen and twenty of them will participate in the celebrations, with the support of the major sponsoring houses, Dior and Vuitton. No frenzied unity, nor historical reconstruction in the approximately three thousand costumes that we will discover on July 26. Each of the twelve paintings visible along the Seine, with its dancers, acrobats and musicians (all in costume), will have its own vocabulary, its type of color, its materials. “Each painting will be a world”, promises Thomas Jolly. Above all, we will also have practiced with science and conscience the recovery, rehabilitation and alteration of numerous clothes. In the gigantic warehouses of Saint-Denis, dozens and dozens of seamstresses are busy on their machines.