“It’s a strange time in fashion, and in the world in general,” said Lucas Ossendrijver, clutching a bouquet of white roses like a spring bride. You bet it’s weird. The roses were actually foisted on him by Lanvin’s owner Madame Wang, whose wide grin indicated approval. She tried to get Ossendrijver and Bouchra Jarrar, the quiet new head of Lanvin’s womenswear, to pose together for photographers. But the press descended first, to get their sound bites.
To go back to the start: If it’s a strange time in fashion, it’s particularly strange at Lanvin, where the architect of the house’s contemporary success was ousted, and has been replaced by Jarrar, a designer yet to show her first collection. All this in less than 12 months. We’ve seen a selection of timid Resort looks from her, but the real test comes in September. Which makes this an odd time for Ossendrijver, unsure of how this changing of the guard could affect his own aesthetic.
Ossendrijver finished that opening sentence by declaring “I decided to be creative. There’s not much else I can do.” Which is all you want to hear of a fashion designer, really.
Appropriately enough, given the bouquet he was cradling, Ossendrijver talked about romance. “Lanvin is all about romance,” he said of a collection with belts and necklaces pierced with metallic arrows, the same knitted into intarsia sweaters above love poems wound around the waist. Those were the literal; you could also ally the general blowsiness and breeziness to Romanticism of the 19th-century breed. That’s a clothing style that is also inextricably linked to Lanvin, particularly its menswear, where softness prevails, tailoring blurring into flou, the whole thing characterized by lightness and lack of structure.
For Spring, that Lanvin romance also translated to a sense of movement and urgency, of fabric flailing about the body, endlessly layered. “Nothing is closed,” said Ossendrijver, talking about flyaway coats and open-necked shirts, everything tugged apart, untucked, rumpled. A number of garments were permanently creased—Ossendrijver and his team painstakingly constructed parkas by hand, only to crush and crumple them under a press before the show, negating their preciousness.
These are all aesthetic tricks Ossendrijver has explored before—that purposeful distress, those schlumpy layers. These strange fashion times seemed to have caused a retrenchment, to territory Ossendrijver knows well. This time, though, all that Lanvin louche wound up feeling a little messy overall, your eye extrapolating single garments from looks—a handsome blue coat, a candy-stripe red and white shirt—that otherwise wound up a morass of material, seams tugged to the outside, artfully unraveling. It’s great to have details like that: Indeed, their use as points of differentiation was how Ossendrijver established Lanvin’s position in the menswear market a decade ago. This offering could have used a little less romance and a bit more restraint, though. Absence, after all, makes the heart grow fonder.
