Early October 2021, it’s still hot during an atypical Paris Fashion Week, with few foreign presences, fashion shows, and showrooms (effects of the pandemic and all relevant restrictions).

After almost two years of absence from the Ville Lumière, with great expectations, we plunge into the neighbourhood hosting Marc Le Bihan‘s space, in the 13th Arrondissement, near Place d’Italie. We don’t really know this area well and it seems not to be so familiar to the fashion circuits. So it’s a surprise, for us, to walk on quiet little streets up to the small hill called Butte-aux-Cailles. Step by step, we get close to rhythms that are completely different from those left only few subway stops before, in the far more animated Marais. We feel the reassuring silence of popular areas on days off and the diffuse white of the houses, like a sunny village on remote Greek islands, interrupted by recurring colourful murals. Bewildered by the sudden change of perspective, almost holiday-like, we arrive, with perfect punctuality, at our appointment.

A blue-stained door opens to welcome us into the French designer’s workshop, located right next door to his home. This is where he has been moving with his showroom for the past few seasons. Far more spacious than in the store in the Pigalle area, it spreads out behind a magnificent green indoor patio, carefully set up to welcome friends and clients with the sincere warmth that distinguishes his mild and generous attitude. An ability to put everyone at ease that involves every single cell, leading it to a zone of comfort and well-being. The meeting is almost touching, after so long and with all the changes faced. We are brought back into the working mood, only after relaxed and affectionate greetings, seasoned with ironic lightness, thus studying and mentally composing the choice of a vast collection, spread in several rooms with soft lights.

A path inside a poetics further evolved from last seasons, where Haute Couture harmonizes with the archive (always present) and novelties with a more contemporary taste.

We have already extensively presented it in the past (for an in-depth look, see here) and Marc Le Bihan manages to develop the same idea of femininity with extreme consistency and creativity, without giving in to the drift of ‘everything returns’ with dreaded and boring redundancies. Although he has now been in this sector for several years, in his 2022 spring/summer collection a tension toward experimentation both, formal and textile, is evident. From the ‘writings’ with moving and contrasting under-stitching that emerge from complex dyeing of silk, daring experiments that halve the size of the starting fabric, to textile patchworks that with the constant use of the idea of an unfinished work – an open work – generate garments with ambivalent categories. Even when you wear it, partially jacket and partially shirt, able of placing themselves, depending on their combination, in very elegant settings or in more informal everyday contexts.

And the presence of tulle, so recurrent in his path, is elaborated within a range of colours that, in impalpable overlays, sketch nuances of touching poetry. A certain latent romanticism, is always included thanks to compositions with more composed and severe lines, with raw-cut profiles and complex tailoring constructions or rough ruffles in silk and elastane.

The assortment is complex, not easy to subtract elements from a symphony in which everything is interconnected, but, in the end, re-emerging from an almost hypnotic enchantment, you find yourself in a personal selection that Marc observes, with curiosity and satisfaction, struck himself by the inexhaustible interpretative possibilities of his proposals.

Meanwhile evening has fallen, with the mottled sound offered by a scratching needle the record spinning, we return to the pleasure of interminable tales and long-awaited laughter…

Around the brand Zucca a private audience is joined together, happily surprised whenever they come in the store and find themselves immerse in such uncommon assortment in European boutiques.

Always a Japanese production, backed by the A-Net group, affiliated with Maison Miyake that also has Tsumori Chisato and Plantation, Zucca can brag with its own path, by now for more than ten years, that testifies a consolidated maturity.

Cleaned by some decorative elements, perhaps a bit too Japanese, it is interesting to notice the skill with which details and particulars are introduced to enliven the quotidian, the dimension in which Zucca is best placed. His design is difficulty applied on big occasions, but instead interprets everyday life with careful diagonal seams, small asymmetries and prints that, together with the comfortable volumes and the use of color, allows the usage in any moment of the day without unpleasant slippages in the banal or, even worse, in the slovenliness. Zucca respects the even more hasty and concrete rhythms, speeds up the wardrobe, does not engage with exorbitant costs and cultivates discreet aesthetics, appreciated when they are so easily put on.

A tour around our Fall/Winter 2017-2018 selection, following the few minutes of our footage from the Paris showroom, can help one imagine herself inside heavy coats, from technical padded jackets to long coats in organic cotton, knitwear in its various weights, to printed dresses or decorated with georgette for the occasions that requires more femininity.

We always underlined the Junya Watanabe’s peculiar interpretative ability in establishing, in the form of dress, the predominant stresses of our time. Post-modern, cyber-punk, tailor-philosopher of an age crossed by very fast transformations, where, from collection to collection, plastics and brand new materials, parts of abandoned industrial landscapes, occurred, to give shape to his personal metabolization and to his interpretation of the contemporaneity.

With the Spring / Summer 2017 is the fierce spirit of the Japanese designer, produced by Comme des Garçons Maison, to manifest itself in the sunny morning walkway of Palais du Tokyo. Deafening hard-rock music accompanies the proud and hurried pace of bewildering metropolitan warriors, evidently intolerant towards an increasingly thorny and demanding present, exceedingly conformist.

To reinforce the rhythm are the classical decorative elements of the punk movement: crests and other disheveled and colorful hairstyles, tattered leggings and hyper-skimpy mini-skirts.

Photo by Vogue

Photo by Vogue

Photo by Vogue

But the Watanabe quat is not slavish and nostalgic, but provocative and pungent. The cue becomes an opportunity to continue with origami exercises, the textiles module is pyramidal, the threatening metal edges of studs and piercings gain lightness and grace in organza processing, up to the extremes such as a stellar westcoat, not by chance pale pink , returning in serious synthetic leather bags and accessories.

The oscillation between the opposite poles: serious and mild, warlike and docile, composes and articulates the collection. On one side the impetus and vigor of oversize volumes, such as sweatshirts, parca and t-shirt and on the other side the feminine silhouette clearly defined by unexpected draperies, generated by semi-invisible seams, floral bouquet and more accommodating fabrics, like organza and georgette.

Against all odds and reference, the two extremes coexist in a new aesthetic balance, where the mutual control and enhancement generates the most unexpected and unlikely punk expression, poetry!

Find more regarding IVO MILAN Radical Fashion‘s choice directly from Place Vendôme – Paris show-room:

While it is now imminent the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute in New York, dedicated to the work of  Rei Kawakubo’s – Comme des Garçons and curated by Andrew Bolton (it will be inaugurate on 4^th of May), the famous online magazine, AnOther, reveals in a long article the showroom of the well know Japanese Maison, the anti-fashion temple par excellence.

Photo by AnOtherMag

A good cue for leading you inside with our video shooting of the Spring/Summer of 2017. Rare outstanding material, a concession obtained with a long collaboration and with a peculiar organization of the store activity, with preparation, archival and historical memory and, above all, with an approach to new proposals of recipients otherwise poorly assisted by scarce communication on this kind of clothing.

For some years now Rei Kawakubo uses the catwalk as the sheet music upon which composes the ceremony of her collections. No more suggestions on what to wear during the season, but philosophical insights translated into highly complex textile forms, from which to draw clues on fabrics and weights that will make up the seasonal assortment. The designer explores and then wraps the spirit of time presenting it to a tense audience with the sacrifice of an increasingly less accessible and intelligible comprehension but, in its abstract distance, more and more poetic and theatrical.

Photo by Crash

In the Place Vendôme space, the bulky shapes resize, becoming viable clothing, which does not deny the feminine silhouette with the excesses promised in the fashion show. The camouflage is wearable in the asymmetries of jackets and t-shirts. The disturbing paddings for the summer translate into irregular folds, stylistic solutions that enhance the movement of the garments or decorative elements for an easier use and composition.

The selection takes place in a space stolen to huge sequenced installations, works first withheld from scene, then immersed in the soundtrack which, looped for days, it evokes and reinforces the suggestions of the recent stage show.