Belgian designer Marie Adam-Leenaerdt is working her way through the building blocks of a woman’s wardrobe, and her third runway collection proves she has a capacity to do that. The show she put for autumn-winter 2024 is devoted to the skirt. Her idea was to test the skirt’s versatility and to explore its possibilities. There were a couple of midi skirts that she also showed as trapeze dresses, the waistband slipping asymmetrically off a bare shoulder; coats with collars that looked more like waistbands; and bags of all sizes designed with horizontal zips – remove the middle sections and guess what they look like? “Skirt skirt, dress skirt, coat skirt, bag skirt,” is how she put it on her press notes. Even the wedding dress finale was constructed simply, like a skirt with hoops that gave it its tenting volume. Adam-Leenaerdt used to work at Demna’s Balenciaga, and the designer is very assertive in making the codes she formed at the brand now her own. So no, these volumes, saturated color palettes, and cape-coats aren’t Balenciaga knock-offs. They originally were 100% Marie Adam-Leenaerdt.
Here are couple of absolutely amazing Marie Adam-Leenaerdt pieces you can shop now!
Fitted-Back Oversized Button Down Shirt
Reversible Wool Maxi Skirt Suit
Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Marie Adam-Leenaerdt is on everybody’s lips in Paris. Although considered a newcomer by the industry, she in fact was a ready-to-wear designer at Demna’s Balenciaga for a couple of seasons. Spring-summer 2024 collection comes in perfect continuity with her previous outing, deliberately designed to complement the ideas that are at core of the brand. The raw, intense, dazzling light of the summer sun at its zenith is used in a quasi-extreme vision that aims to question seasonality and obsolescence through a counterpoint and paradox. In the same spirit, Marie Adam-Leenaerdt’s garments multiply their uses, with systems of ties, fastenings and buttonholes. They can be worn as desired, far away or close to the body, and we appropriate them to create our own personal wardrobe, our own collection. Objects stripped of their initial function are adorned with dress codes, and hybridization is a given: Marie Adam-Leenaerdt’s signature. “Create the surprise“, she says. “Thus, the portable beach hut becomes, almost literally, a dress, in the same referential fabric – a conceptual garment“, the designer enigmatically says. The collection is enriched by some Margiela-isms (like at Vaquera; it seems that this Paris Fashion Week will be big on references to the Belgian designer): a trompe-l’oeil stiletto heel, pool and sand prints, and over-sized, raw denim.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Design & Culture by Ed 