Ami's Alexandre Mattiussi draws inspiration from his friends and fans around Paris. The city is his design studio, and for his latest presentation, Mattiussi let his guests inside. The designer gets much of his inspiration, he said, from riding the metro, where in the morning the guys going to work and the guys coming home from the party briefly meet. He re-created the experience at a presentation in the tenth arrondissement, where the verisimilitude extended to the masses pushing and crushing to get in. (There was even a little in-car music: the singer Benjamin Clementine, who did a rendition of Charles Aznavour's "Emmenez-moi.")
The men who "got on" the train were classic Ami types: tattooed young mecs in parkas and double-breasted coats, boiled wool knits and jeans, flannel shirts and little blousons. There was some distinction drawn between the professionals and the roustabouts—the former wore stiffer shirt collars and coats in more traditional menswear fabrics, like herringbone and Prince of Wales—but they were basically all of the jeune homme type. There was less that was immediately new, the way many of Ami's odd bird prints were last season, but much that was uncomplicatedly shoppable. No wonder many of the editors who came to town for the shows this week made a beeline for Ami's new Boulevard Beaumarchais shop.
