“I’m not critiquing at all,” said Lucas Ossendrijver, carefully, after this Lanvin show. The clothes we’d just seen said otherwise. “NOTHING” read the logo on scarves, jackets, and hats. His placement of an empty symbol—a husk of alphabet-shaped symbols signifying nada—just where we are normally transmitted to by branding seemed like a gently parodic counterstatement to the festival of branding we are now seeing on runways. Instead of a logo—whether single brand as per Fendi, collaborative as per Louis Vuitton x Supreme, or ironic-parodic as per Balenciaga—Ossendrijver’s stark anti-branding felt provocative.
“There is nothing: no meaning, not collaboration, no print, no art, no vintage, no decoration,” he said. “I really wanted the whole collection to be about cut, construction, and proportion—and in the beginning to take things from everyday life.”
Ossendrijver’s suiting exemplified this urge to express himself through fabric and technique. The enlarged shoulders had been pressed mid-construction to create that ballooning, and close inspection revealed minor folds and kinks from its creation that were there, unlike a written logo, as readable signals. A suit in a densely flecked check of red, white, and black was further gridded by shadows from the imprint of the pressing to which it had been subjected during construction. Rich purple technical pullovers—they reminded of ’90s fleeces by Boxfresh—featured mesh and nylon and fleece that was, in fact, shearling. Climbing parkas featured dark curling inserts described by Ossendrijver as “ergonomic” that simultaneously slightly and significantly changed the yaw and silhouette of the garment—he later extended them into duffels. New sneaker designs featured a meshed upper and a puckered circling a micro-bungee to hold them fast. Cropped knits appeared here again under oversize wool jackets with internal buttoning to allow its owner a delicately different form of facade. Also inverted was a bomber jacket reverse-stitched in black suede and blue, gray, and black calf to show the mark of the hand behind it.
“Future Utopia” was written on some garments. And on one, a black jacket, a quote from Lawrence of Arabia: “There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing.” So what was this utopia? Ossendrijver said, “I find it a bit worrying that everything has to be normal. I think in fashion we have to go further than that. We have to bring something new. We have to invent things.” That’s saying something.
