Each season, foreign designers who usually parade at home come to spice up Paris fashion week. Between February 28 and March 3, four labels showed their first Parisian fashion show: two Danish and two American.
“I felt like I had to be in Paris for so long! », exclaims Cecilie Bahnsen, visibly upset after her parade. “Love of craftsmanship and romance” that characterize her work could only really be deployed in France, believes this designer from Denmark who has paraded in Copenhagen for a long time. It arrived in the official Parisian calendar in September 2020, but, Covid-19 obliges, had to be content so far with digital presentations.
This season, in the pared-down setting of the Palais de Tokyo, she was finally able to show her one-off product, vaporous dresses full of knots with assumed candor. “I wanted them to bloom like flowers, to look light and effortless even though they require six yards of fabric. » Their strength lies in the work of embossed, cut, puffy, streaked, padded textiles… but always subtle and in the harmony of colors. The monochrome silhouettes, when they are white or pale pink, could border on kitsch if Cecilie Bahnsen did not take care to integrate excrescences of fabric that jostle the silhouette. Undeniably, the Dane masters her subject.
A wardrobe of exquisite taste
It is also at the Palais de Tokyo that his compatriots from Heliot Emil presented their first Parisian collection. The brothers Julius and Victor Juul who feel they have acquired mature enough to represent Denmark in Paris” seek to develop new technologies and production methods, in particular with 3D printing. “It avoids producing waste”, notice the duo. In the meantime, their techno-martial universe which evokes both Matrix and the 2000s still lacks a bit of finesse.
Same observation for Vaquera, a New York label crowned with a certain hype across the Atlantic, advocating radical fashion for “outsiders”. In the Parisian context, their black latex jumpsuits and down jacket-style thigh-high boots leave you cautious.
Born in the same city, The Row embodies an aesthetic genre that is the exact opposite, a very cerebral fashion, in line with the work of Phoebe Philo at Céline. This is the mark of Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, who, in the previous century, marked the spirits with the series “The party at the house”.
At this first “real” show, at the Hôtel du Crédit foncier de France, near the Opéra Garnier, the waiters offer detox juices with celery and the Olsen sisters a wardrobe of exquisite taste, all in white shirts. and black cashmere dress, with a dash of tradition (the moccasin) and a pinch of eccentricity (sleeves so long they skim the floor). The relocation of The Row to France is decidedly bad news for New York fashion week, already damaged this season by the absence of Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren and Thom Browne.