Passage Of Time. Vautrait AW24

March 24, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

One of the most intriguing runway debuts of the season belonged to Vautrait, the Paris-based brand established in 2021 by Yonathan Carmel. Every label today tries to join the conversation around tailoring, but most of these efforts end up looking pretty much the same. Vautrait however is different. For a young brand, it’s astounding how mature its designs are – just take a look at Carmel’s autumn-winter 2024 show to get what I mean. Take the statuesque wool jacket with a nonchalantly notched label. Or the oversized trench coat with cognac leather, vest-like insert with big, utilitarian pockets. Or the black coat with broad shoulders and faux-fur-trimmed collar and cuffs (from afar it looks like crow feathers). These pieces say: we’re classics. Carmel champions traditional crafts as the key to sustainable creations that shape and accompany the body over the course of its life. According to the designer, the evolution of the body echoes the passage of time, developing and revealing new qualities and properties, just like vintage wine transcends the grapes its contains. Embracing the signs of age thus emboldens Vautrait’s designs that shun a system and its unattainable standards, so focused on establishing temporary and disposable stuff. Yonathan is one of this year’s LVMH Prize semi-finalists. The competition in this edition is especially tough, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Olfactory Gestures. Niccolò Pasqualetti AW24

March 21, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Niccolò Pasqualetti‘s work is like olfactory memory: it can be both elusive and evocative, you nearly think you’ve caught it, but then it fleets like a butterfly and you want to catch it once again. For autumn-winter 2024, the Italian designer and LVMH Prize semi-finalist, muses about ways of dressing formed by gestures, some re-imagined from Etruscan ruins and Renaissance frescoes, some observed in our contemporary times. In fact, an extension of fabric, thrown over the shoulder, makes a garment appear out of nothing but instinct: that’s the case with this line-up’s stunning tailoring and cape-like coats. Solid shapes, cut from cloth, are draped so that their solidity gives way to something more fluid. The latest collection orbits around the idea of riffling through the wardrobe, stuffed with old, but cherished clothes, and how the textures you encounter sweep you away from the present: denim from pairs of jeans in all different washes, scraps from a faux fur coat, a classic tweed blazer starting to fray. Pasqualetti also has an incredible sense of clashing textures and fabrications, which might origin from the fact he started out as a jewelry designer. Sheets of rigid metal collapse into themselves like sheets of paper. Worn as jewellery – a brooch to secure a scarf, a pair of earrings, a cuff over the sleeve – or even as clothing, the shiny warped surface reflects and distorts its surroundings. In the distorted reflection, you see wooden pearls assembled into a kind of “armor”, and leather which looks like crocodile skin forming a variation on the archaic silhouette: the pannier.

Styling: Samuel Drira Photography: Cécile Bortoletti Art direction: Sybille Walter Hair: Mayu Morimoto Makeup: Asami Kawai Casting: Chouaïb Arif Assistance: Eva Rapti Press release: Rhys Evans

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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Anti-Fashion. Phoebe Philo Edit 2

March 8, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Phoebe Philo‘s feverishly anticipated Edit 2 – second collection under her namesake, London-based label – is the perfect detox moment after the long, long, looooong fashion month. No gimmicks, no overstyling, no oversaturation of product, no… fashion. This is an anti-fashion line-up, one that absolutely focuses on style and gives real tools for building an intelligent wardrobe. That’s the real power of Philo’s venture, visually narrated by Talia Chetrit in a low-key, yet commanding way. Anatomy of a Fall and Zone of Interest‘s actress Sandra Hüller stars in the latest campaign, sporting the line’s turtlenecks, tailored trousers and sharp eyewear. In her notes, Philo called the actress “one of the most accomplished talents of her generation, renowned for her intimate, intelligent and fearless performances on stage and screen.” This is a collaboration that only the stars could align.

The designer characterized her brand’s latest offering – available now in her on-line shop – “from the get-go as a continuous body of work”. If you look at the store, you will notice that images from Edit 1 are still up there, mixed with the new ones. This is revolutionary: we’ve got used to the fact that brands usually wipe out their entire websites every three months for new deliveries. The latest “edit” (the brand avoids the word “collection” in its elusive communication) experiments with proportions, setting a dropped-waist leather jacket in a dark berry tone against an ultra-cropped bomber in a mastic hue. We’ve got oversized trousers, doused in “salt and pepper” colors, and upright collared shirts button tight at the neck with raised collars. Double-breasted Milanese jackets flaunt the designer’s crisp tailoring expertise. As for accessories, the popular “MUM” necklace is back. Scarves are constructed as pillows, wrapping around their wearers’ heads with an avant-garde facade; and sunglasses, including the “Peak” and “Bombé” frames, make statements with face-shielding builds. Bags are Philo’s speciality, with the Cabas, Bean Bag and Drive Bag arriving in all sorts of finishes, spanning cheetah print and plushy purple to lipstick red and strong neutrals.

Honestly, you can’t imagine a better collection to review on International Women’s Day. Women rule!

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!