Toughened Up. Supriya Lele AW24

March 29, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Supriya Lele, the London-based designer, is known for her skimpy silhouettes and flesh-revealing cuts. For autumn-winter 2024, her decidedly female viewpoint takes a toughened up direction. “I started thinking about what I was actually wearing,” Lele said. “Every day, I’ve been wearing this baseball coat and slim jeans. And so we started by working into this idea with a really nice kind of leather piece.” It turned out as an over-the-head leather hoodie. The slim jeans part became fine-gauge leggings. “Then obviously, we started exploring the draping that I love to do so much, which I think has now become sort of more of a signature of mine. I wanted to create fabrics that looked wet, almost iridescent.” That effect is definitely conveyed by one of the dresses in white paisley lace, hand-foiled with pearlized paint, subtly underlining the designer’s Indian heritage. What worked in favor of the collection was the way it got captured: at an an ex-pharmacy, with a busy street glimpsed outside and a corner pub over the road (fun fact: Lele’s studio is located on an upper floor in the same building). The spontaneous, uncontrived poses – or rather walks – of the models and the raw surroundings make these hot clothes feel grounded in reality.

Here’s a summer-ready Supriya Lele piece you can scoop right now!

ED’s SELECTION:

Backless Cutout Ruched Mesh Halterneck Bodysuit

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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!

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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

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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.

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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?

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