Fall 2016 marks Lucas Ossendrijver’s 10th year designing for Lanvin. It’s an anniversary that has been eclipsed, it’s fair to say, by departures, both rumored and actual. Not least of Lanvin’s artistic director, Alber Elbaz, back in October. Ossendrijver wouldn’t be drawn into discussion of that ahead of his show Sunday morning, bar stating that the situation had made him consider what motivates him, why he wants to design clothes, why he loves it. It seemed a well-rehearsed line, which doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
There’s a lot of love in the clothes that Ossendrijver makes. On the runway, these are articulated in the minutia of finishing—multiple stitches, unusual construction techniques, odd materials, a feel of the hand. It’s often lost in a vast catwalk panorama, so although Ossendrijver occupied a grand space on Paris’s outskirts, he pulled his audience in close and intimate, the runway rendered a few feet wide. “Zooming in on details,” Ossendrijver called it, echoed by motifs of things like hacksaws and keys, “things you touch with your hands,” he said. A series of jackets were spray-dyed, and pigment was also sprayed across the shoes (in the only overt acknowledgement of his anniversary, Ossendrijver reissued a clutch of sneaker styles from his decade at the label).
The overall feel was lived in, pre-worn, an affectionate scruffiness. Ossendrijver balled up his sweaters into bags and tossed crumpled tweed coats onto hangers not through carelessness, but reality. “It’s clothes,” he shrugged. “You should wear them. They should live.”
Reality was what Ossendrijver was hankering after, joining a chorus of voices lusting after the falling-apart for Fall. It’s not really deconstruction, rather a rinsing off of residual starch and stuffiness, and generally beating up everything a bit. Tailoring was fluid to the point of runny; inside details—besom pockets, revers, and facings—were transposed to the exterior, their flanks made from lining material. Ossendrijver had to cajole Lanvin’s Italian factories not to make everything too perfectly. “I wanted things to be believable,” he said quietly. He said it quietly on the runway too, through rumpled layers, frayed edges, creases, a sense of imperfection.
It was adroitly done, but would have seemed more arresting if it wasn’t merely the closing statement, on the final day of the Fall menswear season, to a general conversation whose other participants seem more emphatic and vigorous. Admittedly, it’s a conversation Ossendrijver helped to start at Lanvin way back when, when he slopped up suits with the sneakers he showed again today.
You thought about that moment a lot. And despite the fact, Ossendrijver said he wanted to look forward not backward with this show, there was something undeniably retrospective about these clothes. Their careworn and aged feel made them feel old, in one way; their references to styles Ossendrijver used to establish both Lanvin’s name and stake in the menswear sphere, in another. The look was still seductive, for a certain type of arty man who longs for the bombast to be pulled out of his wardrobe, even if the stylistic bite was dulled.
That said—wasn’t it great to see a Lanvin show that just looked like Lanvin, without the understandable confusion that could arise from Elbaz’s absence (Pre-Fall was a mess); or the mishmash of external ideas that have previously distorted the label’s men’s offering? Lanvin may have been confirming a consensus, rather than bucking a trend, but Ossendrijver’s offering felt true to himself, to why he designs clothes, and to why he still loves it.
