Tender & Strong. Rabanne SS24

September 30, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

At Rabanne (no longer Paco), Julien Dossena had a mesmerizing collection featuring nomadic warrior women in chainmail armours (occasionally weaved with peacock feathers) and gilded textures. “I’ve never been that interested in the bourgeoisie,” the designer quipped backstage. “I can play on the codes but it’s about exploration for me.” Going by the pictures Jean Clemmer shot for Paco Rabanne in the 1970s, Dossena imagined a kind of warrior beach woman whose wardrobe was founded in ancient constructions. “It’s a woman by the sea, black and white, in the sun with a little loincloth and a jewel. It’s an exalting sensuality. It was a strength I wanted to work on,” he explained. As a meta inspiration element, he printed the pictures on tank tops. The look materialised in hooded mini chainmail dresses, sarouel trousers – “the original first clothes we ever wore: a square with two tubes” – and rustic, organic textures Dossena attributed to the work of the artist Sheila Hicks. “Like a carpet you’ve made a dress [out] of,” as he put it. “I wanted everything to be handcrafted: the feeling that someone touches it; sensual; destroying the fabric; threads.” It made for an ancient sensibility that felt kind of sci-fi. Dossena’s time-travelling looks gave off everything from Athena to Amazon to gladiator to Joan of Arc. “Tender and strong,” he said. “It’s a kind of community: a tribe, a gang of women who express their own sensibility and sensuality.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Miseducation. Courrèges SS24

September 29, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

As the Courrèges models stepped out onto the spring-summer 2024 set, it cracked. Made of plaster and designed to look like moon rock, artist Remy Brière was responsible for the earth-shattering effect. Brière drew inspiration from the stripped-back strategies of Land Art, echoing the clash of Mind and Nature as models strut past, creating audible, visual fractures beneath their feet. If only Nicolas Di Felice‘s collection was as intriguing as the setting – even though the story behind promised a lot. So, the designer was inspired by the imaginary narrative of a woman graduating from university and going on a road trip. Along the way, she loosens up, becoming more open, less burdened as she ventures into the vast desert. There she discovers a “cult run by mothers” and begins her miseducation. However, I wasn’t convinced any of that was truly captured by the rather unremarkable clothes. Models wore elevated campus-like slouchy polo dresses in cotton piqué, oversized Harrington vests and biker jackets, spliced and zipped asymmetrically. Masculinity flirted with the feminine while funnelled necklines were altered to enhance body posture, and, like Amazonian warriors, the girls loomed large. A modern take on the 1960s space-age aesthetic, sculptural gowns and hybrid cotton canvas pieces could morph from military skirts into sleek hooded mini dresses. On leather armour and silver or glass breastplates, New Age symbols paid homage to the elements of the Earth. What truly speaks to me in this new Courrèges collection is the leather jacket offering. There are really good.

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