Flâneur State of Mind. Marni SS24

September 29, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Marni is on a world tour. After New York and Tokyo, Francesco Risso brought his spring-summer 2024 collection to Paris “to continue amplifying connections among our global community. I’m in a flâneur state of mind.” The first time the Italian designer visited the city of lights was when he was 14, and at a party he met by chance “a beautiful creature, who suddenly disappeared, leaving behind only a faint whiff of perfume,” he explained. That subtle French flutter haunted him for years, making him travel to Paris only in the hope of smelling it somewhere again. He never found it, but the magic of Paris was forever imprinted in his memory and olfactory functions. Then, as a teenager, Risso used to visit his friend Serena in Paris at her parents’ house in the chic 7th arrondissement; their neighbor was the late Karl Lagerfeld, whom they spied on obsessively, waiting for him to appear all-black clad in Rue de l’Université “as if he were Michael Jackson.” Recently, scouting for this show’s location, Risso was presented with the possibility of using Lagerfeld’s little Versailles. Et voilà – dots were connected. The private apartments and the formal gardens of the fabulous hôtel particulier where Lagerfeld spent many years were colonized by Marni and its audience. A series of small orchestras, dressed in surgical white vinyl lab coats, performed music by Dev Hynes, a frequent Risso collaborator. The co-ed collection’s flow had a sort of interrupted progression. It started with lean, light, tight-fitting ribbed tube tops in various lengths, to underline the body celebration that’s inherent to Risso’s discourse. Then the show segued into a series of sartorial specimens variously combined: oversize trapeze or boxy-cut tops worn under sharp-tailored trench coats and dusters, paired with straight-cut pants or undulating miniskirts. Most of the pieces were made in soft-bonded techno knitwear to keep their angular shape, rendered into the rainbow-colored combinations of textural checks and stripes that’s a Marni trademark. A few undone crinolines in saturated pastels with apron tops left open at the back and voluminous bell-shaped ankle skirts brushed past the front row, hinting at the obvious reference to the frivolous queen of “let them eat brioches” fame. The crinolines then sort of exploded into the show’s pièces de résistance: a series of exceptional concoctions of fleurs en découpage – visually enchanting, painstakingly handmade creations that Risso called “the ecstasy of the hand.” Hundreds of bright-colored images of flowers, sourced from antique botanical almanacs, were printed on cotton, individually cut out, and then patiently stitched onto bustier dresses with round-shaped crinolines, poufy miniskirts, and a skirt suit with round, jutting shoulders. Adding further wonderment, discarded tin cans were molded into flowers that stemmed, protruded, or sprouted from body-skimming minidresses. “This is the virtuosity of the hand that goes against pervasive virtuality,” said Risso. “We’ve got to undress our mind, and dress up our senses.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Butterflies In My Stomach. Undercover SS24

September 28, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Jun Takahashi delivered a zsa zsa zsu – what Carrie Bradshaw calls the feeling of butterflies-in-your-stomach – moment this season. Literally. For Undercover’s finale, three models materialized out of the darkness wearing strapless dresses whose skirts seemed to light up. From a distance they looked like movie projections, but as they approached it became clear the skirts were glowing from within. Moving closer still, you saw the colorful flowers and… butterflies. Terrarium dresses are a new level of ingenious, a technical feat as well as an emotionally resonant one. Through an interpreter backstage, Takahashi shared that he was grieving for people he was close to. “He feels like he’s stuck in the world, but he wants to release himself.” The butterflies, the interpreter made sure to add, “will be freed, of course.”

Reckoning with mortality is an undercurrent of Takahashi’s shows lately. It’s said that grief doesn’t end, it only changes. That it can produce powerful work was proved today. This was Takahashi at his most focused: the leitmotif that carried from the first suit to the final terrarium dress was transparent veiling or shrouding. To start, he showed neat tailoring, the sheer materials exposing the inner construction and the items he slipped between the front and back sides, like playing cards, straight razors, and silk flowers. On a camel trench the outer layer encased a set of feathered wings. Later on came more formal suits, not see-through but swathed in more black georgette. They were as elegant as any tailoring anywhere this season, but Takahashi isn’t someone who seems to look around at what his peers are doing; for one thing, he’s too busy. Three of the looks here reproduced portraits from his first-ever oil painting exhibition, “They See More Than You Can See,” held in Tokyo earlier this month. Like the figures on his canvases, the faces on the deeply ruffled skirts had their eyes deleted, or disappeared, an eerie effect that was echoed in the other figurative pieces, which reproduced the surreally beautiful paintings of the German artist Neo Rauch. At his art show in Tokyo, Takahashi said “painting is more personal”. But this was a deeply personal show and it was a spellbinder.

Upside-Down. Dries Van noten SS24

September 28, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

“Familiar-unfamiliar and unfamiliar-familiar” was how Dries Van Noten described his starting point for spring-summer 2024. “Things that you really know but done in a completely upside-down, inside-out, special, strange way.” The Belgian designer took his all-time favorite wardrobe staples that have always been present at his brand, and looked at them through a new, twisted perspective. The collection came from traditional menswear – shirt stripes and khakis, with some denim tossed in the mix and lawn sports like tennis, cricket, and rugby. Van Noten made those familiars unfamiliar by adding a feminine touch. For the first exit, shirt stripes turned up on a bralette worn with a generously cut camel coat and knee-length shorts. On other looks, khaki cargo pants morphed into a long wrap skirt, and an enlarged schoolboy blazer was paired with a shirtdress covered in delicate see-through paillettes. Among the sports references, the rugby stripes were especially distinctive; he cut them into polo shirts that wrapped around the torso and T-shirts that slouched off one shoulder, as real as it gets but still unexpected. Backstage Van Noten said the collection was a companion piece to his men’s show in June, where he set out to redefine masculinity for a younger generation – cue the sequined basketball shorts. Women have been flirting with menswear essentials for decades, so it’s harder to surprise in this direction, but there were plenty of delights.

Spiritual. Niccolò Pasqualetti SS24

September 28, 2023September 27, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Sometimes, a small, tightly-edited collection might be worth more meanings than an entire, budget-proof fashion spectacle. “In the white space, you see things for what they are, and you forget where they came from,” says the enigmatically vivid press-note for Niccolò Pasqualetti’s spring-summer 2024 collection. The white space might refer to the white cube venue the young designer chose for his fashion show in Paris. But it might also allude to a more metaphorical, imaginary space. In such a place, one thing easily changes into another. “A simple evening dress, a classic Italian suit, caught in a moment of transmutation, evaporates into a cloud. Each detail, the buttons, the zippers, the stitching are disturbed by this process. Yet still some recognizable pieces pierce through the fog, only slightly obfuscated by it.” Garment distortions are Pasqualetti’s key signatures; drawstrings, secreted in garments, are able to totally transform the silhouette. Take the free-flowing cape that cinches itself to form a column. Like protective clothing, when pulled tightly, it forms a seal with the body. These fastenings reappear, in the shoes, and in the hoods which hide within the collars of jackets. In Pasqualetti’s poetic world, there is no night and day, as everything happens at the same time. Pockets multiply across the collection giving each look a newly practical dimension regardless of the occasion. Then, laid on top of everything, silver jewellery that resembles out-of-this-world, spiritual amulets. Yes, that might the right word to describe this collection: spiritual.

Styling Samuel Drira
Photography Cécile Bortoletti
Art direction Sybille Walter
Hair Mayu Morimoto
Makeup Asami Kawai
Casting Chouaïb Arif
Words Rhys Evans

Method. Saint Laurent SS24

September 27, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The spring-summer 2024 Saint Laurent collection, presented on a marble runway against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower last night, gave a mood. But did it deliver truly great, contemporary-looking clothes? Anthony Vaccarello has found a new formula for his job at the Parisian maison: find a theme from Yves Saint Laurent’s vast archive, refresh it for the eyes of a contemporary customer, and consistently stick to it for the entire season. This sort of repetition-technique delivers strikingly coherent collections that sell well – and give YSL’s legacy a new relevance. But I felt that something started to crack in Vaccarello’s “genius” method this season.

The new collection was inspired by pioneering women through the lens of Saint Laurent’s late 1960s Saharienne look. Vaccarello looked to the likes of Amelia Earhart and Adrienne Bolland, who infiltrated “domains once considered exclusively male.” Earhart’s influence was perhaps the most evident, with aviation themes filtering through in aviator sunglasses and head-caps. Formula 1-style racing dress also came to the fore, with utility-style jumpsuits sitting sharp on the shoulders, slouching at the leg and belted tightly at the waist for shape. As the models progressed through the stage, service jackets and cargo trousers gave way to billowing, pleated gowns, mesh tops and glittering mini dresses in khaki, beige, burgundy and deep blue. Of course, it all looked super-chic and refined on the moody runway – an entire production, actually – but in the end, I thought the clothes had a rather dated outlook at what successful, contemporary women want to dress like. I doubt they want to be invested so much in 20th century nostalgia.