It’s a moment of change and possibility in Paris. There are vacancies at the city’s most storied brands, there are persistent rumors about high-level departures at others, and there is a new vanguard of young designers shaking the system from the ground up. Christelle Kocher, the lone woman in the new group and a second-time LVMH finalist this year, got the week off to a rousing start tonight. The setup was the 18th-century Passage du Prado lately adopted by African hairdressers, mobile phone shops, and a currency exchange place, down which her girl and boy models stormed at top speed. “I’m sharing my Paris with other people,” Kocher said in a hair salon–turned–backstage area halfway down the street. The real Paris is what she meant, and trust me, we were a long way from the Louvre on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, where a couple of homeless people huddled under rain-soaked sleeping bags close by the model lineup.
Kocher works for Maison Lemarié (what Lesage is to beads, Lemarié is to feathers), so she brings amazing craft to her work. That in and of itself is hardly unique in Paris. What makes her radical is the way she applies her techniques to utterly quotidian clothes: hoodies and tees, mostly. Her creations are precious, but not precious. And then she ups the ante by presenting them on friends and people she meets on the street (alongside professional models) and turns the music way up. Before long this evening, the distinctive odeur of cannabis could be detected. The vibes were so supercharged, in fact, that the photographers urgently screamed at guests who were crowding the passageway and getting in their shots.
There was a lot to take in: a shearling jacket densely patchworked with layer upon layer of fraying white lace; a sequin print dress (shades of Margiela) affixed with crystal cabochons; a cobwebby sweater of multiple stitches woven through with ribbon; a hoodie with a bias-cut couture drape. Much of it was mixed back to faded dad jeans, or the occasional pair of fleece sweatpants. Nonetheless, it’ll be expensive stuff. It looked like Kocher was trying to address that with the blurred photo prints of her brother’s motocross days, which she twisted and tucked into easy dresses or folded into origami-like shapes that she added to simple T-shirts. A snap-front sweatshirt was stitched with hundreds of tufts of multicolored feathers. In a word, fabulous.
