Stumbling across a family photo of Niki de Saint Phalle, Julie de Libran researched the late artist, only to discover that she was born in 1930, the same year as her house’s founder, Sonia Rykiel. More than that, Saint Phalle was Franco-American, like de Libran, and spent time in San Diego, where the designer lived when she was Stateside. She had her Fall muse.
Both Saint Phalle’s wardrobe and her work inspired this collection, but it’s the latter that proved the dominant thread. Les Nanas au Pouvoir, which de Libran spelled across the front of her sweater and on intarsia fur scarves, were Saint Phalle’s famous large-scale painted plaster sculptures of women. Picking up the Nanas’s vivid shades, de Libran used them as accent points: overstitching the edges of raw linen peasant dresses and tracing the outlines of double-breasted coats, re-creating Saint Phalle’s colors in an oversize tweed, and embroidering large-scale flowers in thick yarns, leaving the ends dangling off hems like works in progress. The glam of de Libran’s early collections was more or less replaced here by a crafty eclecticism—witness the tiny drawings of lips on a silk pajama set, and the hearts embroidered on the bell sleeves of a prodigious Aran sweater. In some cases, the instinct to embellish overpowered the clothes. The best pieces were minimally adorned, like the midi-length linen dresses, or the soft tailoring with brushed brass columns.
De Libran has always had a special way with evening clothes, and here she dialed the glam back up. Quilted satin bed jackets and capes and befeathered flat sandals look like the kind of outfit an eccentric artist would enjoy wearing on her big night out.
