Cristaseya Edition #22

March 20, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Cristaseya is a Paris-based, lifestyle brand which isn’t bothered with the fashion industry’s crazy-paced schedule. Cristina Casini and Keiko Seya, the founders, both have worked for years as stylists for publications like L’Officiel, Numéro and i-D. One day they realized they don’t really see their personal style reflected in any of the clothes they go through everyday at work. In 2013, the duo decided to launch their own label with an aim to release “editions”, not collections, of around 20 items – specifically, one edition per six months. No overproduction, no hurry – just a pure, creative process which combines highest quality craftsmanship with the attitude of soft minimalism. The newest edition – #22 – is now available on their site, and the offering looks like the perfect transitioning-into-spring wardrobe. Fell in love with their voluminous collarless coat with leather piping, all the party silks, cool pajama suits and their ventures into handbags: the leather basket in different earthy shades and the fit-it-all weekend bag.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Less is More. Y/Project AW24

March 15, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Y/Project‘s Glenn Martens proved this season that sometimes less can be really more. The high profile and influential designer owned the fact his brand faces financial pressures and cancelled his runway show. In response, an important discourse opened up on the internet: the current industry system isn’t really working for independent brands. “Very honestly, we had a cash flow issue,” Martens candidly said. “We did the commercial showroom during men’s week, and we actually did grow. But at a certain point you have to make a choice. It’s €450,000 for a show, or €450,000 for pre-payment for production and making sure the collection is on time on the sales floor.” That Martens chose production and the sales floor will benefit his team and his brand in the end, of course. And somehow, the autumn-winter 2024 collection benefited too from that decision, because the lookbook is brilliant. Everyone from his father to to Interview‘s Mel Ottenberg and Purple‘s Olivier Zahm to his favorite stylists Haley Wollens and Camille Bidault Waddington is captured in the line-up. For the new collection Martens said he was thinking of pleurants, the sculptures of mourners that decorated tombs in medieval times, an instinct motivated by a sudden personal loss. He also mentioned Umberto Eco’s Middle Ages murder mystery The Name of the Rose. Putting his draping chops front-and-center, he added hoods to otherwise familiar garments like button-down shirts and fleece jackets, or inset sheer panels behind a row of buttons that gave his clothes a slouchy asymmetric shape. Some pieces featured manipulable velcro pieces that let their wearers adjust their silhouettes in the same way his bendable wire has been used in the past. A coat, for example, can convert into a cape, while a painterly floral print skirt can completely change form. Other pieces were shrouded with sheer net. The veiled pant suit gave the term fashion nun new meaning.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Chic Interaction. A.P.C. x Natacha Ramsay-Levi

March 15, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

For its 22nd Interaction, Jean Touitou invited designer Natacha Ramsay-Levi to revisit the great A.P.C. classics. Known for imagining clothes that reveal the personality of their wearers, Natacha Ramsay-Levi, former Louis Vuitton and Chloé designer, also likes to push the boundaries of masculine/feminine binarity.

It is with this state of mind that Natacha Ramsay-Levi has taken on the materials and emblematic pieces of the A.P.C. wardrobe: denim, poplin, cotton gabardine, which she twists in her own way, rethinking proportions.

Here are my favorite pieces from the capsule collection, which has dropped today!

ED’s SELECTION:

Lemaitre top

Cartel belt – this belt will age SO well in your wardrobe.

Horace trench coat – cropped trenches are a thing now!

Versailles shorts

Concarneau sandals – Natacha did similar sandals at Louis Vuitton under Nicholas Ghesquière’s direction, a very distinct chunky sole.

Rosario Small bag

Madame De Rivoli dress – a super chic over-sized shirt that can be worn as a breezy mini-dress. Soooo Parisian.

Madame Recamier trench coat

New Haven T-shirt

Clinteau jeans – are these the new perfect jeans?

Sainters denim jacket

Decade Later. Louis Vuitton AW24

March 8, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

The way time flies is crazy. I remember Nicolas Ghesquière‘s debut at Louis Vuitton like yesterday. But it was exactly a decade ago. 10 years is an eternity in fashion. Probably his first collection for the brand feels so fresh in memory because it was so distinct and sharp, so envelope-pushing. That can’t be said about every Ghesquière moment for Louis Vuitton, and definitely not about the autumn-winter 2024 line-up, additionally suffocated by the sci-fi venue production and the list of front row guests, with everyone from Cate Blanchett to Brigitte Macron. The designer was definitely looking back at key pieces from his Vuitton oeuvre. As strong as his design language is, the references were easy enough to spot. The jackets heavily embroidered with metallic threads and embellished with cabochon stones recalled the anachronistic frock coats of the Louis XVI collection for spring 2018 he presented in the medieval part of the Louvre. Sparkling skirts that bubbled below the knees seemed to be a callback to spring 2021, a pandemic-time show he staged without an audience. And the swirling asymmetric hems of the fringy evening numbers evoked the deconstructed scuba-suit dresses from his resort 2017 show in Rio De Janeiro. But while Ghesquière is a master of constructing the most innovative clothes, which he proved throughout his tenure at Balenciaga, I often feel like his Louis Vuitton lacks on ergonomics, especially in the way its (over)styled lately. If you’re not on a brand contract, do you really want to dress like that in 2024 with conviction?

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Lady Girl. Miu Miu AW24

March 7, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

“Every single morning, I decide if I am a 15-year old girl or a lady near death“, Miuccia Prada told Vogue in her recent profile. Looking at her latest Miu Miu collection, Miuccia definitely felt like the first, but with perspective of an experienced woman who has lived a LIFE. It seems that while being 74 years old, the designer has never felt that liberated creatively. She knows her codes. She knows what’s up. She’s loves to mess it up, and she understands exactly how to make the industry fall on its knees.

Again, Miu Miu is the winner of Paris Fashion Week, and the impact of the autumn-winter 2024 – styled by Lotta Volkova – will be perceivable in the way we interact with fashion for the next six months (or more!). Classics, uniforms and bourgeois staples are twisted and subverted, creating a collection just so multi-faceted and frivolous that you just can’t resist it. The show opened with shrunken coats in heavy wool, worn with cuffed slacks, mum’s pearls, and a roomy zip-top bag tucked under the arm. Capote’s “Swans“? Not really. The man-size gloves suggested the Miu Miu girl sees the world through a different lens. She’s on the ground with her two feet. Even while wearing her short little baby-doll shift dress sprinkled with strasse embroidery and lady-like wool suits paired with grey schoolgirl tights and black leather Mary Janes. “Everyone can choose from them, to be a child or a lady”, said the designer after the show, which included some models who were nearer to the designer’s age including Kristin Scott Thomas and Dr Qin (a Shanghai-based doctor and huge Prada collector).

This season, Miu Miu – which originally in the late 90s and early 2000s meant to be Prada’s sister line – has always been like a daughter, who sometimes hates her mother’s image, and sometimes looks up to her. By mother, I mean the Prada wardrobe. Silk 1950s skirts came in so-bad-it’s-good floral prints in the most acidic shades known to human eye. Even the family heirloom “mink” coats (they were actually dyed shearling) and the kind of chic LBD’s that Audrey Hepburn might have worn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” weren’t just classy, they were daring, they had nonchalance of a youngster. Miuccia, I love you!