Yoon Ahn is riding the perfect wave. Her label, Ambush, has risen from a jewelry outfit into a bona fide ready-to-wear line; she has a sizable personal audience of somewhere around a quarter million on Instagram; and Kim Jones has appointed her as Dior Homme’s jewelry lead. Her work there will appear later this week—“Kim gives me a lot of freedom,” she said yesterday in Paris—but at the moment, in the courtyard of the Atelier Brancusi, Ambush was the sole focus. “This is sort of . . . the teenage version,” added Ahn with a laugh.
Her Spring collection was young skewing, sure, but it was also very well done and rinsed with a mature, worldly sense of laid-back, natural instinct. Ahn’s wellspring was a visit to the Big Island in Hawaii (she expressed condolences to those affected by the recent eruptions of the Kilauea volcano) and its surrounding waters, calling them “spiritual.” “Ultimately it’s about keeping it simple, and you know, with surfing, you can’t resist. You just have to go with what the ocean gives you.”
That thinking swelled up into myriad reference points having to do with island living—and it felt personal, given Ahn’s time spent in Hawaii as an infant and the fact that she still visits once or twice a year. Jewelry, her forte, has crystals (“Because crystals are made of sand”); her best-selling lighter holders are now available in fluorescent colors; earrings will feature sterling renderings of airport souvenir key chains; and necklaces will drip with linked metal daisy chain leis. On the clothes tip, Ahn introduced functioning wetsuits (must-haves), patchworked linen tops, big and breezy shirting, and a mock life vest as a puffer jacket. A fringed oversize straw hat was lent a baseball cap base, with a gothic A embossed at its center. It was exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from a talent like her—recognizable because of its inspiration but shown in a refreshing way. Winning the heat: two metallic gold and mercurial surfboards that can actually be used, shellacked with automobile paint in Japan. “That would be so cool; it would blend with the water,” Ahn said, pointing to the silver one.
