Quite recently, I was chatting with a renowned and sharply observant fashion stylist; she mentioned something that she’d been thinking about the industry for a while. “Sometimes,” she said, “you don’t always know who the designers are actually designing for.” You could be forgiven for thinking that, in our hyper-speed-moving, nanosecond-trend-overload moment, the “who” has almost become an afterthought; as long as strong, pervasive images keep a-coming, then someone will inevitably want what’s on offer. That wasn’t the thought that crossed the mind at Antonin Tron’s accomplished Atlein outing held atop the Institut du Monde Arabe one snowy Paris morning, his third show and fifth collection for his label. It was refreshing to see a talented and relatively young designer—he’s in his early 30s—be so clearly preoccupied with the “who”: real women with real lives who might actually want real clothes. And rather cool ones, too. He riffed on where he started, a sensual slip-sliding of jersey around the body, then fused it with his more recent preoccupation with utilitarian tailored forms.
Backstage, Tron explained the use of the words of The New Yorker writer William Finnegan from Barbarian Days on his invitation, an evocation of the exhilarating physicality of surfing, which Tron knows all about. (He’s an inveterate rider of the waves, from France to Scotland—and beyond.) Tron called it his most personal collection yet, and you could see why. For all the intricacy of the clothes—a terrific navy belted coat that opened the show, flying open to reveal wide pants as if moving with the wind, or the plaid jersey placed on the bias and ruched, the print recalling the kind of cozy shirts he’d wear after being in the chilly water in the early morning—it was also reductive in its own way. Clothes shouldn’t forget their physicality when worn; they should work. And work they did, be it one of the variations on a shirt turned into a coat or jacket, perhaps layered under a hooded gilet; a sporty zipper-necked cable-knit sweater atop a slim jersey skirt with a hem that fell into points; or any one of his body-hugging columnar dresses, the necklines elegantly pulled askew. In all, it added up to a collection that sought to be more than inspiration or image; it sought to be meaningful. When the conversation turns again to who’s actually thinking about whom they’re dressing, you just know whose name is going to come up.
