After luring us to mundane, off-the-Fashion-Week-grid parts of Paris for the past three seasons, Christelle Kocher brought us somewhere historic today. So historic that many of her local friends admitted to never having been before. It’s the Folies Bergère, a music hall that was at its peak nearly a century or so ago, when Josephine Baker danced in the role of Fatou wearing artificial bananas and not much else.
The venue was an apt metaphor for Kocher’s new collection. Up until this point, she’s been known for bringing couture finishings to streetwise clothes—think crystals affixed to a mesh T-shirt, or lace trimming a jacket. This season she focused on elevating her silhouettes. “It’s my fourth collection,” she said backstage. “I wanted to bring more maturity, to contrast the street culture with something more fantastic.” Look one was a trussed-up rugby shirt—nothing unexpected about that—but it was paired with a ruffled silk wrap skirt in burnished gold and down below were her first-ever heels, and bejeweled heels at that, made with Goossens and Massaro. Later, there were many more takes on those ruffles, culminating with a pair of terrific ruched trapeze dresses in vibrant shades of pink.
While we can all agree that the tracksuit has begun to feel played out, Kocher shouldn’t veer too far from the street sensibility she started with. The most astonishing looks here were the ones that blended low and high, like the parka (on a female model) and the bomber (on a male) in which multicolor feathers were trapped underneath a transparent tech fabric. And Kocher took that rugby idea and really ran with it, slicing and dicing the preppy staple into dresses and an asymmetrically draped evening top, along with eye-catching shirts in a number of different fabrics for the dudes. Get this girl a Tommy Hilfiger collaboration.
