It was a dense crowd happy to be there who met during the fall-winter 2023-2024 collections week, in March, in Paris, to discover Martine Sitbon’s new project. A presentation organized by Rev, a label launched by brothers Laurent and Arik Bitton, founders of the ready-to-wear brand Iro, which they sold in 2019.
Their idea? Reinterpreting the look of the 1980s and 1990s, through collections that alternately call upon an androgynous darkness and a stripped-down femininity. Martine Sitbon signs this first collection of Rev.
A wardrobe faithful to the obsessions of the designer who was at the center of Parisian fashion in the 1990s. We find her masculine suits with an impeccable fuzzy cut, her devoré velvet dresses with a bias cut, or her blazer jackets worn loosely on simple colored tights.
With her peers Martin Margiela, Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, Martine Sitbon helped shape a fashion aesthetic of the early 1990s. A strong and feminine look, tinged with references rock, where dark romanticism was never far away, and which then announced the beginnings of the grunge phenomenon. Launched in 1986, in Paris, the brand that bears her name was then the meeting place for girls looking for a different and assertive silhouette. The designer also worked with the greatest talents of those years, whether photographers Craig McDean, Corinne Day or Paolo Roversi, models Kate Moss and Kirsten Owen, and, of course, with her companion for many years. more than thirty years, the artistic director Marc Ascoli.
Born in 1951, in Casablanca (Morocco), Martine Sitbon very early sharpened her eye for a fashion radically different from the sexy Versace way, also in vogue at the time, notably through her many trips to England and her love for music. 1970s, Velvet Underground in the lead. In 2005, the worst thing that can happen to a designer happened to her: she lost the use of her name. Her brand, Martine Sitbon, of which she was a minority shareholder, was in fact blown to her by a Korean financial partner.
However, she revived in 2006, with the Rue du Mail brand, by joining forces with the Chinese-American industrialist Jimmy Chan, and will continue until 2014 to spread her androgynous and romantic universe. Poor financial management will force it, however, once again, to mark the end of this project. Since then, she has worked as a consultant for various ready-to-wear labels and signed a beautiful book, in 2016, with Marc Ascoli, Martine Sitbon. An alternate view (Rizzoli). At 72, here she is ready to once again expose her vision of fashion, with the enthusiasm of a beginner.
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