In his first pre-collection for Lanvin, Olivier Lapidus set out to establish the label’s current identity by mining the distant past. There’s a lot to sift through. Lanvin is the fashion world’s grande dame—the oldest continuously operating fashion house in France. What’s more, next year marks its 130th anniversary. Talk about a tight deadline.
In his process, Lapidus decided to zero in on the house’s founder, Jeanne Lanvin, as well as her entourage. “I wanted to give a meaning to the history,” the designer explained, noting that Madame Lanvin was the first fashion designer to venture into collaborations with artist friends, such as the illustrator Paul Iribe. She also coined the term lifestyle—anyone curious to see what she meant by that should visit the reconstitution of her Art Deco–era apartment, designed in collaboration with the furniture maker Armand-Albert Rateau, one of the highlights at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.
“What I found, above all, is that Jeanne Lanvin was extremely modern,” Lapidus noted. “She liked secrets and hidden things.” To reinforce visual branding, Lapidus has reworked the brand’s mother-daughter logo by Iribe on buttons, the thread linking their hands, and put an embroidered grosgrain ribbon under jacket collars, which the wearer can wear up or not. Somewhat less subtly, a long-forgotten JL logo from the 1920s has been resurrected and restylized as zipper tabs and a signature on knits. He even went so far as to transcribe the house’s name into Morse code, and from there into a fine ribbed knit—“an illegible logo,” Lapidus quipped. But he had it patented just to be sure.
With the notable exception of select pieces, such as fuchsia draped or ruffled evening dresses and a bold, graphic statement coat punctuated with gold embroidery, the emphasis was squarely on sporty separates and daywear—fluid, seamless skirts; fine knits and suits in menswear fabrics with a pagoda-sleeve jacket. The accessories line, including several jewelry stories by Elie Top, added some extra oomph.
The Lanvin woman as Lapidus sees her lives somewhere between fashion-forward (but not too) and classic (but not too), so his mission now after a not-so-great start on the runway last September, he said, was to “give the house’s signature elegance a contemporary twist.” So far, the accent seems to be on contemporary. Lapidus allows that there’s a new artistic collaboration in the wings. That could prove a neat piece of symmetry. We’ll be watching for the twist.
