Christian Wijnants is one designer who tends to think like an artist. Season after season, he’ll revisit a theme patiently and consistently to plumb whether there is anything else to say. Turns out, there’s always plenty.
The collection Wijnants showed today, a mix of Resort and Summer, spun his “girls traveling through Persia” story a little further out. The designer added flourishes like tops proclaiming love or forgiveness in Farsi. However you feel about the now-ubiquitous message trend, you’ve got to hand it to him: It’s a clever twist.
Wijnants also seized on the idea of scarves, transposing them into skirts and dresses to breezy effect. In integrating long scarves on tops and dresses, he pushed a bourgeois construct into bohemian territory without going overboard.
Prints inspired by ceramics and centuries-old illustrations have been a baseline for a few seasons now. With an extra shot of silver lamé, those became slightly more precious than before. A sky blue and silver trench in silk georgette with organza interfacing was a winner.
In conversation, Wijnants always circles back to wanting to make clothes that women “really live in,” so he offered up a few extra thoughts in denim and tempered the prints by slipping them under overalls with an apron effect, for example, with a scarf doubling as a belt. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. The oversize plaids and maxed-out gingham might be a little harder to pull off. For city dwellers, most of Wijnants’s looks skew off-duty—the slingbacks festooned with garlands of Swarovski crystals made the overall effect slightly more Parisian.
