Just a year after snagging the top prize at Hyères, Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh are juggling their menswear brand in addition to Nina Ricci, the Avenue Montaigne’s highly respected but ambivalent grande dame.
Those two windfalls let them scale up Botter’s tiny studio in a back courtyard in the 11th arrondissement. “It’s a balance,” Herrebrugh allowed during a recent showroom visit, explaining that the couple’s collections may start from Rushemy’s sketches, or 3-D. “It’s a conversation and a very organic process,” she said.
If there is a common thread between their first outing for womenswear at Ricci and Botter’s menswear, it can be found in ideas about wrappings, in a literal sense. Herrebrugh has roots in the Dominican Republic, Botter in Curaçao, so they picked up a few ideas from tropical fruit markets as a springboard for an array of motifs and prints. “I think we have the same aesthetics because we had the same upbringing. We saw the same colors and flowers when we were young; we have the same values and the same process,” they explained, completing each other’s sentences.
For Spring, they spun fruit stickers into colorful scarves or splayed them on an asymmetrically buttoned tweed jacket. In a riff on couture techniques from the Ricci atelier, they tweaked the traditional polo, making it slope-shouldered and seamless, or integrated a tank top with a short-sleeve shirt, a nod to what a favorite uncle might wear. A flap on the back of a cotton canvas jacket was run through with a drawstring so it could roll into a scarf; it looked both fun and functional. A few jackets, like windbreakers and a turquoise number with frayed edges, had crossover appeal.
The Botter duo loves injecting an element of surprise into their clothes, and this season they delivered in an oversize black sweatshirt hybrid that can flip into pants, its neck hole intact but hidden among the folds. The idea was hilarious, and only for the brave. Slipping jellies over sneakers was a cute styling trick, another nod to the Caribbean. Who knows, those may catch on too.
