Getting away from it all—or at least making his clients feel as if they’re getting away from it all—is one of Christian Wijnants’s strong suits.
During a showroom visit, the designer said he was mixing up inspirations from the past and present. Those included references to Indian motifs and a sort of scrawl print that he referred to as “new handwriting.”
Also new to this collection was a push into menswear, with separates—notably tubular and pared-down argyle knits—that women might want to crib.
“I’d never thought of doing men’s before, really, but now is the right time,” the designer commented during a showroom visit. “There’s a bigger link than there was before.”
The designer looked to India not just for colors, but also for draping and satins. “I love the idea of the way of dressing, draping; it’s a very natural way of enclosing the body,” he said.
Some of the standout pieces include silver separates, woolen silks, and washing and overdyeing treatments that made separates look worn (but not overly so). A bird motif sailed through womens- and menswear the designer offered, nodding to the photography book Sâdus by Denis Rouvre. An association of warm colors, like putty, mustard, and brown, was a case in point. To that end the designer also used motifs across tailoring and flou. The suits are mainly for the bold, but here’s betting that Wijnants’s base snaps up the fringed numbers in a flash.
