A showcase running until March 21 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs puts the late designer’s leatherwork in dialogue with medieval art and a new generation of ANDAM laureates.

PARIS — Yohan Serfaty, the late founder of Y/Project, saw leather as a second skin that was equal parts armor and archive.

“Leather was really what represented him,” said his sister Nathalie Serfaty, who created the Yohan Serfaty Foundation and endowment fund last year. She added that it also became a way to address the illness that claimed his life in 2013.

The material is front and center in a Musée des Arts Décoratifs showcase soberly titled “Hommage to Yohan Serfaty,” running until March 21, that doubles as a surprising dialogue between his work, medieval art and a new generation of talents distinguished by the ANDAM Awards.

On a crocodile-skin jacket, the material’s markings remain visible, evoking a scar left by one of the operations. Serfaty explored that experience in “Y.Scar,” a name he intended as a play on the English words scar and care, depending on how you placed the punctuation, his sister revealed.

What the setting, three rooms devoted to the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, also draws out is the late designer’s Gothic sensibility, shaped by Hollywood films, heroic epics and Arthurian legends. Leather-and-silver jewelry appears amid gilded icons and carved ivory depictions of biblical scenes; a leather-and-knit look from his fall 2012 Catharsis collection is shown laid flat, evoking a recumbent and recalling the collection’s show staging.

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