For this festive season, Isabel Marant, the eternal Parisienne, offers a capsule of 1980s-centric chic, suspended somewhere between Saint-Germain and Manhattan, with extra sheen and shine. Her carefree and bohemian style is reflected by refined LBDs, metallic scuffed ankle boots and timeless leathers. “For me, fashion is about enjoying life,” she explains. “It has to be positive. It’s a release of energy to people, putting bad vibes behind.” Your New Year’s Eve look, splashed in Marant’s sequins, will definitely attract good vibes for 2024!
When it comes to French style, nobody does it like Officine Générale‘s founder and designer, Pierre Mahéo. For spring-summer 2024, the designer “wanted it to be simple, but when it gets too simple, it’s boring, so you sort of need to trick it with styling.” He added: “I didn’t want undressed, I wanted downdressed.” Those sentiments underscored what the collection upheld: a languid fundamentality that wasn’t plain, but truly desirable. Mahéo made a strong case that purity in form can still come with a little flair and dazzle. The beautifully cast show opened with a black-and-white toned palette, and paired tailoring, foulards, and loose, almost pajama-esque shirting. Waistbands were elasticized; socks and garters were knee high – it clashed undone and done up nicely, but fell, impression-wise, on the simpler side of things, which was exactly Mahéo’s intention. The super chic designer also mentioned, in his show notes, that a “cold and rainy” winter in Paris led him to inject a bit of warmth into the mix. Enter ultraviolet and teal tones, tank tops and breezy shorts. Officine Générale is known for elevated essentials, yet this all felt truly summery – like Mahéo was exhaling, and finding a new stride of easygoing magic in the moment. Oui, oui, oui!
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At the Isabel Marant fashion show, you had a comforting feeling of familiarity and were reminded who is the epitome of true coolness in Paris. The runway classics, from Anna Selezneva and Liya Kebede to Malgosia Bela and Sasha Pivovarova, hit the autumn-winter 2023 runway in quintessentially Marant designs. Square shouldered blazers, oversized parkas, boyish sweaters, ’80s cocoon coats, conical heeled boots, slinky dresses, denim boiler suits and a killer trousers shape with straight yet slouchy legs. The list goes on. Isabel Marant has long championed female empowerment in everything her label stands for, and that includes making the kind of louche, sexy but always spiritedly casual look that focuses on allowing the woman wearing her clothes to express herself and her physicality. In a season where the everyday and the real are being celebrated and elevated, where good clothes can matter and not be disposable, Marant cannily underscored how much she’s been doing that for years now. That, plus the casting of models who are her stalwarts, women who’ve been around a bit but still look utterly fab, not to mention the celebratory atmosphere of her show, translated into the fact that wearing Isabel Marant means looking good and feeling good at the same time.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Anthony Vaccarello‘s work at Saint Laurent has reached new levels of creative success since the designer started to read the YSL glossary and began translating its nuances and quintessences into contemporary interpretation of painfully hot, Parisian chic. The autumn-winter 2023 collection, presented on an elevated, chandelier-lit runway that looked exactly like the one on which Yves presented his shows in the 1980s, focused on a look as simple (and eternally good-looking) as a masculine, big-shouldered jacket worn with a pencil skirt. This power-look came down the runway in various fabric and silhouette iterations, nearly always kept in black or white with pops of tartan plaid or earthy brown. Some of these sharp blazers evolved into flowing, floor-sweeping capes of silk or velvet (for the evening), or were nonchalantly wrapped with plaid scarves (for a rainy, Parisian day). There’s really not much more to say about the collection except for the fact it’s another impressive exercise of refinement coming from Vaccarello, and a very seductive, smart, and commercially-vital homage to the YSL legacy. In the voice of a Catherine Deneuve-esque Parisienne, “chic, no?“
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
I gasped a couple of times while browsing the Officine Générale autumn-winter 2023 collection. Those were gasps of utmost awe with Pierre Mahéo‘s take on the eternal French style, which is a combination of restrained elegance and exploration of the idea of uniform. For this designer, consistency of dress is a form of elegance that he not only studies but has practiced for decades. He’s always admired people who, by choice, design, default, or whatever, stay true to their own style. He, too, continues to wear, and cherish, a timeworn pea coat. “It’s about a sentimental relationship to clothing,” the designer offered backstage before the show, recounting how last autumn, when his team was brainstorming this collection, he realized he wanted to just focus on the two colors he’s been wearing himself for the past 30 years or so. “I don’t want to change things, I want to perfect them,” he said. Monochro-Mania therefore took shape as an ode to blue and grey, the two elemental colors of every Parisian wardrobe. For Mahéo, it was an essential exercise in exploring why he does what he does: why those colors, why he reinterprets them season after season, why continuity makes him happy despite the fashion pendulum’s inevitable swings. And, especially, expressing many things with a spare vocabulary, “in the same way that Serge Gainsbourg famously stuck to five pieces of clothing.” For the new season, the Officine Générale uniform might be a simple-looking T-shirt in wool jersey, layered over another and paired with matte wool trousers that are slightly more ample than they were last season. Here and there, Mahéo slipped in some iconic references, variously a military-inspired jacket that nods to the olive one worn by Al Pacino in Taxi Driver; a steel gray velvet jacket – perhaps worn with a touch of pink – that plays on Wes Anderson’s register; or a style of cape long favored by Prince. Here and there, a swirled print cropped up on a shirt and trouser, or a blue silk flower on a shirt (obsessed!). On the runway, the clothes gave an overall impression of reassuringly chic Rive Gauche style. Love it.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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