On October 7, Extinction Rebellion will once again be active in Paris, and those taking part in the protest will include the Atlein designer Antonin Tron, who has quietly been a member of the environmental protest group since the end of last year. I say “quietly” because he’s been loath to say too much about his involvement for fear of being labeled an eco-designer, or for Atlein to be dubbed a sustainable brand, though in some ways both are true; for Spring 2020—a collection of gorgeous, grown-up, and chic (yay, bringing chic back!) clothes—Tron was able to use 60 percent deadstock fabrics that he’d sourced from mills and factories across Italy. (And in another right-minded effort, he designed a tee bearing the image of a white-cheeked gibbon; 20 percent of the sales will go to fund Extinction Rebellion.)
Still, Tron has a point: It’s amazing (and, okay, not wholly surprising) how quickly the green tag has become a marketing tool to engage the Insta-generation, a corporatized initiative to somehow speak to fashion’s place in the very real and frightening future we are heading into. While some of the biggest global behemoths have been engaging with how they can play their part, mindful of both the environmental challenges and cultural shifts we are going through, the reality is all too apparent: How does anyone in fashion square away their participation in the industry, an industry built on the perpetual thrill of the new, at the very moment when consuming more, more, more is the very last thing any of us should be doing?
It’s something Tron has been trying to reconcile ever since he was moved to sign up with Extinction Rebellion; reconciling his creative impulses with his own unwavering commitment to real action on climate change. And he has arrived at a kind of militant peace (if you can call it that) with himself, where he can bring together being someone who makes clothes of value that are designed to last and last, and someone who isn’t prepared to eschew his political stance. “The answer, I realized, isn’t in the big things,” Tron said backstage just before his show, “but in the small.”
For “small,” read: “concise” (he’d whittled down the show to 31 looks), “local” (he has chosen to make most of his clothes in his native France, with technicians and craftspeople who’ve been making things the same way for years), and “personal.” Ever since he launched Atlein, in 2016, it’s obvious he has been intimately engaged with the draping, cutting, and manipulating of (usually) jersey, which is a very him fabric; it yields to the body of its wearer with ease, but it needs a lot of dedicated and delicate handling of the technical challenges it presents to get it there. Tron is a thoughtful designer, a problem solver in pursuit of beauty. Any one of the terrific sinuous black dresses that he showed more than ably demonstrated his ability to work with the fall and flow of the material, highlighted perhaps by bias-cut panels of a pastoral floral print, or planes of fabric folded over and embellished with a row of gold snaps. They were so good, it’s hard to think of those as small, so ambitious and perfect were they in their execution.
