Among the designers of his caliber, capable of imagining a high-end and pragmatic wardrobe, perhaps he is the only one, in 2022, to appear nowhere on social networks. ” I hate this “, give up Lucas Ossendrijver straight away. Going against the grain of a time when designers not only share their collections and photos of the celebrities for whom they design custom-made outfits, but also their holidays, their parties, their travels, sometimes their love life and their marriage…, the Dutch designer shows the screen of his smartphone to prove the absence of the Instagram icon: “I had Facebook for a while but I stopped. I find it all intrusive, suffocating. I don’t want to be constantly asked. Having to answer, having to like, having to watch who likes what… I have enough stress as it is. »
Admirers of his work, characterized by a fine balance between tailoring (the art of the tailor) and technical clothing, could therefore well chomping at the bit on their applications. Since leaving Lanvin in November 2018, Ossendrijver has given no news. “I needed a real break”, he explains in a Parisian café, with his remaining Dutch accent and his friendly delicacy. It must be said that the house had been going through a turbulent period for several years – during which creative director Alber Elbaz was dismissed in 2015 – from which it is still struggling to recover today.
time to relax
After fourteen years supervising the men’s line of the French label – in other words an eternity, in a sector where the contracts of artistic directors are rather signed every three years – he took the time to live, to relax, to invest his new apartment, to grow, on his terrace, facing south, cacti and plants “Australian, New Zealand, South African”, whose exotic forms he likes.
“I dreaded the descent but the black hole never came. I realized that there is life outside of fashion. » He declined several proposals, those involving “too many sacrifices and too many responsibilities”. Then, after long discussions, he ended up agreeing to ” take a new start “ with Theory, the minimalist New York brand founded by Andrew Rosen in 1997 and bought in 2009 by Fast Retailing, the Japanese giant which also owns Uniqlo, Helmut Lang and Comptoir des Cotonniers. Lucas Ossendrijver has set his conditions. Not an artistic director position that would have required settling permanently in New York, but capsule collections, under the Theory Project label, that could include feminine silhouettes, a territory he had not yet explored.
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