According to the enthusiastically voluble design team member present—who cannot be named, as is the credo of Faith Connexion—this collection was put together in under a month. That short schedule prompted team Faith Connexion into some impressive creative acrobatics plus plenty of improvisation. He implied that a grafted three-part topcoat in a tricolor of Harris Tweed, bouclé, and cashmere had been fashioned from fabrics by hand in their Sixth Arrondissement deconsecrated church workspace.
The house’s compulsion for mixology was in full flow via a red check wool outdoorsman’s coat layered with an ostentatiously street-regal paneling of scarlet faux fur worn over a 19th-century-style hussar’s jerkin and tight torn denim. Research into vintage Swiss Army uniforms from the mid-1980s that had caught the Faith Connexion eye led to some excellent patched combat pants heaped with aesthetically adjustable straps, and a series of parkas and liner jackets that ranged from one produced by a bona fide military contractor in Belgium to Faith Connexion versions heaped with paillette. A trenchcoat with belt-like straps running down its arms and a check captain’s armband was very cool. Collaborators this season included the returning Neapolitan denim crew Never Too Much Basic (NTMB) and two new transient members of the Faith Connexion collective, a Greek artist named Dionysus (real name) and a 90-year-old American mouse named Mickey. Faith Connexion struck a deal with Disney to produce a capsule of maison Mickey Mouse sweats that bore a bleach-washed patina. Dionysus had hand-painted about nine pieces of denim, while the NTMB team had applied their DIY graphics to denim and sweats that proudly included the 081-telephone prefix of their home city. A red moiré silk and nylon suit for women plus a gold variation for men looked less thrown together, more pieces of precision-cut, unrushed luxury.
That was all happening chez Faith Connexion this week. Next week, it’s a new drop of collaboration footwear with Giuseppe Zanotti and a fresh round of high-tempo, short-deadline, high-low mixology to get on with.
