Since fashion started using upcycling – or upcycling, in English, a recycling which would bring an extra soul – it generally adds sober colors, a stripped-down aesthetic, moralizing speeches or top-of-the-class self-satisfaction.
Against all that, goes Kevin Germanier. With his label, Germanier, launched in 2019 and which he shows at Paris Fashion Week, this 31-year-old Swiss has shown that we can recover materials and retransform them into multicolored and sparkling outfits for excessive, half-creature heroines. kawaii, half sea monster.
For this, he uses sequins recovered from dormant stocks in Shanghai or Shenzen, unused ostrich or pheasant feathers found in Parisian cabarets, unsold pearls or plastic flowers from Hong Kong, vintage denim from Thailand. or old acrylic wool from Switzerland.
Fur from plastic bags
Born in Granges, near Zermatt (canton of Valais), in “one thousand nine hundred and ninety-two”, A shy and dreamy kid, he grew up draping fabrics on his sister’s dolls or bath towels and curtains to dress Samuel, his little brother. After attending the Geneva School of Art and Design, in 2013 he entered Central Saint Martins, one of the largest English fashion schools. He does experiments there using old pillowcases cut up and sewn back together, recovered fluorescent bead embroidery, plastic bags from Tesco supermarkets torn up and then recomposed into fur.
“Of course, recycling or repairing was nothing new: my grandmother sewed a flower onto her pleated velvet church uniform more than half a century ago, and as a child my mother always glued those horrible Smurf patches on my scuffed pants. However, in London at that time, despite the influence of Vivienne Westwood and the English second-hand culture, it was not so well regarded to create with old things. »
Systematically, its student collections are revealed “grey, black or beige”, remembers the man who we have never seen dressed in anything other than black and whose Parisian apartment is today, his friends joke, made of “fifty shades of beige”. But when he arrives in master’s degree, he makes a change. “For the end-of-studies collection, I wanted to surpass myself, put myself in danger, continues Germanier. I set myself the task of only working with color and shine. I was right: what scared me made me better. »
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