The Institut Français Berlin Presents Les Vitrines: Fabienne Audéoud and the Shop with the Blue Sweaters
An exhibition at the Institut français Berlin exploring textile, uniform, and identity
February 05th, 2026
From February 12 to June 11, 2026, the Institut français Berlin hosts Les Vitrines featuring Fabienne Audéoud’s project The Shop with the Blue Sweaters. Paris-based artist Fabienne Audéoud works across sculpture, painting, and performance, with a practice shaped by her musical background. This new presentation extends her long-running Sweater Shop series, which has evolved through multiple settings and moods. For this iteration, Audéoud introduces a new collection of sweaters in navy blue, the color of the French National Guard, opening to the public on February 12 at 7:00 pm.
The exhibition examines the symbolic and historical weight carried by uniforms and by the color navy blue in particular. Far from neutral, navy blue inherits meanings rooted in royal power, colonial trade, bourgeois ideology, and republican order. Across its many variations—royal, Prussian, sea, business, or republican blue—it permeates social life, from police uniforms to formal attire. Audéoud highlights how this supposed neutrality masks conformity, identity retreat, and gendered norms, with masculinity positioned as the unmarked standard. The uniform becomes both protection and projection, concealing vulnerability while asserting authority and respectability.
Through her sweaters, Audéoud challenges this visual and ideological framework. Her navy blue garments deliberately refuse the strength and discipline associated with uniformed attire, instead embracing fragility, imperfection, and deviation. Some pieces are secondhand, bearing visible traces of previous wear, while others are produced from a single fabric pattern that mimics knitted texture. Awkward construction, disproportionate forms, and visible flaws disrupt the austere logic of standardization, creating a deliberately “bad couture” aesthetic. These deformations serve as embellishment, introducing a cheap baroque quality that resists normalization.
The installation unfolds as a soft, undulating frieze, structured through repetition and variation of the same material. Within this wardrobe, the figure of the dandy emerges—a historically masculine character who asserts individuality through subtle distinctions while blending into anonymity. Audéoud’s textile language draws parallels between clothing and literature, where fabric becomes syntax and imperfections act as punctuation. Wool, knitwear, and narrative intertwine, suggesting an intimate relationship between garments and writing, between bodily presence and literary imagination.
The exhibition concludes with a performance by Fabienne Audéoud, presented in the concert hall of the Maison de France, extending the project into a live, embodied dimension and marking the closing chapter of The Shop with the Blue Sweaters.
