Julie de Libran was greeting guests at the entrance of Sonia Rykiel's Boulevard Saint Germain boutique tonight. The scene was set for her debut as creative director with waiters from Café de Flore, Rykiel's neighbor across the famous Left Bank street, serving champagne and finger sandwiches. "It's a homecoming," she said. Paris fashion week has been marked by good-byes—Peter Copping at Nina Ricci, Guillaume Henry at Carven—so it was pretty sweet to witness an arrival, especially one as genuinely promising as this.
Rykiel has shuffled through a couple of designers since the house founder retired in 2009. The work has never measured up to her legacy. De Libran comes to Rykiel from Louis Vuitton, where she designed the preseason collections under Marc Jacobs, but her connections to the Rykiel brand are deep. "My mother wore it a lot, so this felt like coming back to her closet a little bit," said de Libran. "There are so many codes, and there's such a nice heritage, which I'm lucky to be able to take from and reinvent, to kind of close the archive, and just go by my selective memory."
In the crowd: Sofia Coppola, a friend from the designer's LV days, sat next to Juergen Teller, who contributed a photograph for the invite, while models from Georgia May and Lizzy Jagger (mama Jerry Hall worked for Rykiel back in the day) to social media stars like Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner summed up the respectful yet not overly reverent spirit on the runway. De Libran has a light touch. Rykiel's signature stripes materialized in many different guises: on tweedy tailoring, knitted fur chubbies, a belted organza peasant dress and the bikini underneath it, even on a basic V-neck. As a female designer, she can romance an easy three-quarter-length denim skirt or an army parka just as well as she can a sequined minidress, but by the end of the collection, things were pretty damn glam, with satin salopette jumpsuits and fur jackets slung off shoulders. When it's right, you know it. De Libran was back at the door to say her good-byes, surrounded by a crush of well-wishers.
