For her show today, Christelle Kocher booked the 17,000-seat arena where Drake is performing when he comes to Paris in a couple of weeks. What’s the designer of Koché, a little label that cross-pollinates streetwear and couture, doing at a mega-venue like that? Inviting all the fashion students in Paris to attend as guests and otherwise making good on the messages of diversity and inclusivity that she’s trumpeted since her start in 2015.
Like Kocher’s previous outings, this show featured a mix of professional models, friends, and street-cast beauties of all colors and genders. As they walked by, their names flashed on the jumbotron and the LED screens circling the arena—Adilack, Kelton, Morgane, Alix. (The one negative about the space was the distance between the models and the seats.)
As with the women and men who wore them, Kocher’s clothes this season were a global patchwork, especially the spliced football jersey numbers, which were spectacular. She collaborated with the Paris Saint Germain team for Spring 2018, but these bias-cut dresses—some embellished with feathers, lace, and sequins—were more ambitious, combining uniforms from countries across the world. “It’s nice as a message, bringing geopolitics together,” Kocher said backstage. The cross-pollinating didn’t end there: After a research trip to Japan, she built 25 pieces using wool from the country, some of them merging traditional Eastern shapes with couture-ish Western ones, like the orange karate gi topped by an extravagant ostrich-feather chapeau, a nod, Kocher suggested, to Yohji Yamamoto.
That coat had substance to it, a real heft. But Kocher’s true gift as a designer is her ability to combine dressmaker techniques with the ease of activewear—to soften couture codes and give them the everyday sensibility that young people who grew up in leggings and sweatpants demand. Those football jersey collages are a good example of this, but so is Kocher’s own uniform: a jacquard Le Smoking that she accessorized with sneakers and a nailhead-studded bodysuit. She has a real stamp; she should keep cultivating it.
