Creativity centre-stage on Paris Fashion Week’s last day
Paris Fashion Week ended on a high note on Sunday. Alongside the big names, a plethora of labels stood out in the last day of catwalk shows, presenting stimulating collections in a wide range of styles. Notable among them Japanese label Doublet, French labels Pigalle Paris and Lemaire, and South Korean label Wooyoungmi.
Doublet’s rural punk
Japanese designer Masayuki Ino, winner of the LVMH Prize in 2018, has unveiled his Spring-Summer 2022 collection with a catwalk show staged in Japan, inviting his guests out in the countryside, among greenhouses and vineyards. The tone was set from the start by the thunderous notes of the rock anthem accompanying the show.
The models roll in, piercings and spiky punk hairstyles prominent in their bad-boy looks, clad in personalised black leather jackets and trousers, or in tops and shorts in turquoise and green lurex.
Little by little though, the wardrobe seems to veer towards the rural, brimming with vegetable references such as the leek-coloured tie, the denim jackets sprouting mushrooms on their back, or the patches shaped like onions, tomatoes, cucumbers and oranges decorating a jacket's lapels or woven, like a jigsaw of washers or doilies, into crocheted cardigans and other knitwear.
Pigalle Paris’s techno-craftsmanship
Stéphane Ashpool has changed register. The jack-of-all-trades French designer/businessman picked a jazzy soundtrack to unveil some of his new collection’s items in a short film running to barely a few minutes. The film is chiefly about sensations, conveyed through an experiential video blending images of water, light, reflections, close-ups of textures, and coloured dyes dripping and flowing on fabrics.
It traces the ageing, perforating and crackling treatments to which the leather of a jacket-shirt and a pair of patchwork trousers is subjected to. Elsewhere, the focus is on fluidity of movement, highlighted in a silk fuchsia pyjama-suit. There is always a sportswear vibe to the garments, as in the shorts-and-top outfit in fleeced cotton worn by a model through a slow-motion sequence.
Lemaire’s everyday elegance
At Lemaire, the models, both men and women, stride across the screen in profile, wearing lightweight trench-coats with wide lapels, worn over cotton skirts or trousers in the same neutral hues, variations on a grey and beige palette. Everything is smooth but perfectly crafted, comfortable but sophisticated, generously cut while wonderfully accenting the silhouette.
From mid-length dresses with a classic feel to suits-and-shirts total-look combos, to more casual outfits featuring t-shirts, baggy jeans, cute little tops, denim jackets and shorts, Lemaire’s simple yet skilfully constructed clothes look like winners.
The models wear them with ease, whether running through a downpour or brightened by warm summer sunshine that highlights the abstract, colourful prints of Lemaire’s cotton sets and oversize canvas bundle bags. Designer duo Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran shine notably with their draped dresses made from a single piece of fabric that gently envelops the body, wrapping it in a delicate swathe of frills.
Wooyoungmi, or the art of detail
A railway station with an imposing Art Deco canopy is the backdrop for the South Korean label’s ‘catwalk show’ video, in which the models stroll alongside the station’s massive red wrought-iron pillars, clad in elegant outfits alternating neatly cut sets and innovative sportswear looks, while the backdrop gradually dissolves into weird psychedelic swirls.
Woo Young Mi, who founded the label in 2018 and took back over the creative direction of the label in March 2020, puts painstaking attention into the collection’s details and accessories, from the cuffs of some sweatshirts to the wide elastic belts that mould the waistline like a corset, worn over trousers, shorts and even waterproof jackets.
She has fun notably with a particularly quirky item, a kind of hooded shrug featured in tough cotton, like the fabric used in trench-coats, or in a technical mesh fabric, combined with a mesh hood and worn like a plastron.
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