Camille Bidault-Waddington

If you know my site for a while, you might have noticed that I never write about all the high street fashion brands and their events / special collections / collaborations. Well, here’s an exception: Camille Bidault Waddington for & Other Stories. When I saw the look-book images from this extraordinary capsule collection on Instagram earlier today, I was so, so pleasantly surprised. I mean, it’s Camille! The same Paris-based Camille, who’s most frequently behind the scenes, working as a stylist for independent magazines like The Gentlewoman, Purple, Holiday or Dazed & Confused. She’s also the woman who adds her final touch to Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s Chloé. And, she occasionally walks the Eckhaus Latta runway in New York. Shortly speaking, if you want the right person to co-operate with on a capsule, Camille is the perfect choice – not some oversponsored, unexperienced, flashy blogger.

Come 6th of September, and you will meet these friends in your nearest & Other Stories stationery store (or on-line): an over-sized trench coat, olive-green dresses and pants fit for autumn layering, pencil skirts with chic slits, beige camisoles with lace inserts, faux python skin pumps… at the first glance, it all looks like a remix of Phoebe Philo’s classics at Céline (Céline with an accent, mind you). But then, CBW wore all that two decades ago, and continues to dress like that today. How down-to-earth of her to share personal style favourites with a wider audience. That’s what I call a collab.

Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta of Eckhaus Latta, like other New York-based designers (whether that’s The Row or Vaquera), aren’t satisfied with the current state of United States. To that extend, that (according to Cathy Horyn of New York Mag) Latta and Eckhaus stopped working on their autumn-winter 2017 collection in November, discouraged by the election. But then, something sparked. “We just designed what we wanted,” Latta told Horyn. And that’s noticeable in the clothes – the designers, by confronting the reality, wanted to design freely. Will it sell? It doesn’t matter that much. But I doubt these semi-hippie floral dresses with velvet sleeves and boiled knits in earthy colours won’t find a place in a wardrobe of, let’s say,an art curator. There’s no main theme behind the collection, but rather an off-beat take on such essentials like blazers (voluminous and boldly coloured here) or a skirt (lenght adjustable). Specific, conceptual character of Eckhaus Latta clothing can’t be precisely conveyed by usual models. That’s why Zoe and Eckhaus do their best to invite people with passion for what they do to walk their shows. This season you could spot super-stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington, multi-disciplinary artist Julian Klincewicz and actress and writer India Salvor Menuez along other creative individuals and designers’ friends.