Lightness. Lemaire SS24

June 23, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

As the models arrived at the expansive Lemaire runway – an enclosed university parvis accompanied by a score composed of rain, city sounds and birds – looking this way and that, walking with purpose, their light, tonal layers were primed for a summer afternoon downpour. And for all their stylistic idiosyncrasies, they could have belonged in Paris, but also Vietnam, where a recent trip inspired Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran to explore how travel encourages a more deliberate rapport with what we wear. “We like to design from reality,” said Lemaire. “Like everyone, we’re experiencing global warming and the need for lighter fabric, lighter clothes, protection pieces – and we try to bring that functionality to our work.” Tran noted how this body of work is currently full of archetypal shapes – twisted, balloon, boxy – that can be revisited season after season. These designs are already so elemental and timeless that adjustments need only be incremental to register as fresh. “It’s just about adding layers that evolve with time,” she said.

The palette brought added dimension through an alluring spectrum spanning earthy, fleshy, inky, and airy. Two unassuming prints – a dark stripe and a faded floral – made the lineup feel believable, less rigid. But to see a sea of sameness would be missing the Lemaire approach altogether. “What we like to do is present characters and not just themes,” Lemaire said, noting that they spend considerable time on casting. “We want [the models] to feel credible. For us, style is about that… when there is a coherence of the personality and outfit.” For the designers, the intention in every collection – but particularly in this one – was about seeing the clothes in the street. “What we’re interested in is to try and embellish reality. We should learn to look at reality, so we start by that… and hopefully we end with looking like a better version of ourselves,” Lemaire summed up.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Something’s In The Air. Hed Mayner SS24

June 22, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Hed Mayner, the designer from Tel Aviv who keeps on charming the Parisian crowd for a couple of seasons now, loves a big, big silhouette. He is known for blowing up conventional, “normal” clothes to capacious, XXXL volumes, creating garments that are both timeless and absolutely poetic. Those that fall under the roomy category for spring-summer 2024 are the beautifully tailored suits, eternal chinos, (crinkled) cotton poplin shirts and minimal jumpers. Mayner chooses to see the beauty of normalcy and simplicity by giving it a dramatic makeover. The way that the pieces fall on and fit the body, and how these garments with vintage-y soul have characters of their own, is a combination of Mayner’s well-considered design and Samuel Drira’s masterful styling.

All The Beauty and The Bloodshed. Christopher Kane Resort 2024

June 22, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Yesterday’s news of Christopher Kane entering administration and considering selling his namesake label make you realize that in this industry, truly inventive creatives have to struggle, while others get unlimited budgets and press just… because. It’s no news that running an independent creative fashion label in London is practically impossible, but the vision of Kane exiting fashion is just heartbreaking. His knack for wickedly original, sometimes even disturbing pairings of strange materials and references has earned him a reputation of a playful conjurer who with grace combines non-obvious sexiness with contemporary chic. Hopefully, the designer will find a financial solution similar to Roland Mouret, another significant London-based designer, and will continue designing under his own name with new, supportive partners behind his back.

If resort 2024 is actually the last Christopher Kane collection we will ever see, then it’s exemplary of the designer’s unique fashion vocabulary. This line-up is packed with chic-funny-simple evening ideas that look like a joy to wear. Should you detect a ’50s/’80s post-punk New Wave-ish vibe coming off it, you’re not wrong. As ever, behind every brilliant Christopher Kane party-trick, there lies something darker. This time, Christopher and his sister, Tammy, had been watching All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the documentary about Nan Goldin that weaves her groundbreaking ’70s and ’80s photography into footage of her campaign of protest against the Sackler family’s sponsorship of major museums and galleries (The Sacklers own Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical company whose main drug is the opioid Oxycontin). It struck them that the connection between the forces of super-wealth at one end of society, and the most deprived at the other were stingingly present – in the clothes. It was the sight of the cocktail dresses, lingerie, and scrappy gowns worn by Goldin’s penniless junkie LGBTQ friends that resonated. “The reason they looked so amazing in their poverty is that they were wearing second-hand and discarded clothes thrown out by the wealthy – couture, designer clothes from the ’40s and ’50s”. For them, that fit with their childhood and teenage memories of seeing the deprivation of communities in the post-industrial Glaswegian conurbation they grew up amongst. It took them back to remembering the glamour of the neatly-dressed barmaids serving in Working Men’s Clubs in the mid-to-late ’80s—another source for the sexy synthetic fitted dresses they conspired on in this collection. The subversive references they use aren’t at all visible, of course. What Kane always does is to turn the brew of associations into relevant fashion. Really, not many contemporary designers have that skill.

Slow Moments of Delight. The Row SS24

June 21, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The Row‘s appearances on the Parisian fashion week schedules are always slow moments of delight. The spring-summer 2024 by collection makes you truly question all that pointless noise that other brands are emitting to just be noticed for an Insta-second. A selection of the 80 looks for spring, designed and dreamed up by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, appeared on mannequins through an enfilade of handsome hôtel particulier salons on Place Vendôme, punctuated with hand-picked furniture from Parisian galleries, naturalistic floral arrangements, and waiters serving plates of red currants. There was no music; simply an ambiance of calm grandeur suggesting a certain cultivated, very Parisian sensibility. That got perfectly conveyed by the clothes.

The collection was introduced with an explanation that an expanded range of men’s wear yielded pieces that overlapped with the women’s offer. Can you spot the knee-length, black leather trench that reappears throughout the lineup? The leisure shirts with their retro stripes? The jeans that have been skillfully shredded at the knees, enhancing their desirability? Note, too, how the tailoring that seemed intentionally boxy and generous on a female frame is as intentionally streamlined on the male counterpart. Although the designers were absent, their presence was felt across the spectrum of this covetable wardrobe: laid-back layering; intellectual silhouettes; and lived-in looks that might be as basic as a button-front shirt and chinos. For every item in a dressier register – see the hand-embroidered slip dress worn over a gray T-shirt (very Martin Margiela), or the pumps with higher heels – the collection suggested a casual confidence. The lineup was also particularly palette-diverse, as primary hues alternated with pastels – see the bold red high-neck dress and pale pink cashmere polo. An outfit that comprised an outdoorsy jacket, pine green corduroy shirt, and jeans was at once erudite and everyday, as though it conveyed some admixture of vintage inspiration and social studies. New versions of signature bag styles were unapologetically capacious and as faithful to The Row as any logo. We all know that Paris style is ineffable and cannot be reduced to a single archetype. But the studio here can absorb the local culture and benefits from the proximity to manufacturers in France and Italy, where a large part of the collections are made. If a retail location to rival the stores in Los Angeles, New York, and London would give The Row its Paris bona fides, let’s agree for now that the brand has definitely perfected its je ne sais quoi.

Men’s – PharreLl’s Take. Louis Vuitton SS24

June 21, 2023June 21, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

In anticipation of Pharrell Williams‘ debut collection for Louis Vuitton, the actual meaning of a “fashion designer” became a big discourse on the internet. Do we even need a skilled designer when a brand like Louis Vuitton hires a big (and undoubtedly stylish) entertainment industry name instead? What we’ve seen yesterday in Paris was a show (more of a business-, than fashion-, noting the Grammy-like front row featuring everyone from Beyonce to Rihanna) in its purest sense. The Voice of Fire choir singing loud; the Pont Neuf and what seems half of Paris lit up and ready to accommodate the mega-event; the Jay-Z concert afterwards… and what about the actual clothes? There was plenty of merch, as well as true eye-candies, that’s for sure. But Pharrell seemed to approach the debut more like a styling exercise. A bit of Nigo and Kim Jones menswear sensitivity here, a couple of Wales Bonner and Bode touches here, a sprinkle of Virgil Abloh nods there. The Karl Lagerfeld-level ego was palpable as well (even a Chanel-like tweed jacket popped in one of the looks). As you might already know, the garments were heavily covered with the green pixelated Damier duds, and all sorts of LV monograms known to man. Of course, the most powerful of all were the accessories, the brand’s primary money-makers. Zingily colored Keepalls and Almas and Neverfulls and Speedys, worn in clusters. To be truly honest, the collection wasn’t neither bad… or outstandingly good. But it will definitely sell loads.