The announcement that Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh landed the Nina Ricci job left vacant by Guillaume Henry’s departure caught many industry watchers by surprise. The Botter designers won the Festival d’Hyères Grand Prize in April of this year on the strength of an irreverent runway show that blended creative men’s tailoring with a provocative anti-sea-pollution message. They seemed about as antithetical a choice for Nina Ricci’s brand of femininity as could be. Maybe they were hired to rewrite the house rules? Unreconstructed, old-school frills are starting to feel fairly anachronistic, after all. Maybe there’s a corporate interest in adding men’s, à la Celine?
Botter and Herrebrugh will make their Nina Ricci debut in early 2019; we won’t know until then which way they decide to take the brand—traditional or unexpected. But there’s no such thing as a season off, so the company’s Spring collection was produced by an in-house team put in place around the time of the duo’s hire. It’s a commercially minded showroom offering—a “palate cleanser,” a studio rep called it—not runway-worthy, but not without viable pieces, like a navy technical nylon trench, an easy shirting-stripe silk midi dress that pulls over the head with little fuss, and mannish pantsuits in solid or striped twill. If we’re reading the clues right, Botter and Herrebrugh will be thinking mighty differently about the house heritage.
