As we enter the second year of the pandemic—and that must be as awful to read as it was to write—plenty of us are still being challenged to think (and do) anew. Parisian designer Boramy Viguier—whose work mixes up medievalism, mysticism, and modernism into a strange otherworldliness (that’s totally a compliment, BTW)—is proof of this never-knew-you-could-till-you-had-to approach.
The new approach, in his case, is filmmaking; in the last six months, Viguier has made two. His first, late last year, was presented as part of GucciFest. His second will showcase his fall 2021 collection, with Viguier codirecting alongside Samuel Rixon. Compare this to the fact that, in the relatively short life span of his label, he’s done one live runway show. Given his enthusiasm for the filmic genre, maybe that show will have been his first and last. I mean, and this is as good a place to mention it as any, Viguier’s penchant for moviemaking doesn’t just extend to his own collections. He’d love to costume design something by his favorite director, Paul Thomas Anderson. I will, as they say, just leave that there.
But back to fall 2021, which is called—as is the film that it features in—Resurrection. How’s that for a title rich in symbolism? Resurrection is a dark fable populated with knights, priests, the hoi polloi of a fantasy royal court, and one very Joan of Arc–like heroine (played by French rapper Mona Guba) in all sorts of finery. Finery, incidentally, which is the perfect encapsulation of the more dressed-up approach that menswear seems to be steadily heading in (and which Viguier has proved to be a pretty adept advocate of for several seasons now). For Viguier that means a new idea of a suit, with long lean jackets in jewel-toned velvet or midbrown English gabardine, worn with narrow trousers. By contrast, there are other coats whose ballooning cocoon shapes have a whiff of Cristóbal B about them. His ecclesiastical, clerical tailoring and dog-collar tunic-y tops, meanwhile, come printed with a clash of religious imagery and arcane tarot illustrations.
Sometimes, Viguier will bring a sharp sense of today, which keeps everything grounded in reality. Take, for instance, the way he layers up those print pieces under knit pieces he has created in a punkish, DIY way out of deadstock from his own studio and found vintage—or, as he puts it, knitwear “on its way to the bin.” While Viguier is in the thrall of all of that is Umberto Eco–esque, he also embraces the need to contemporize (and democratize) the metaphysical romanticism. “I want to make myself really comfortable with the art of tailoring being juxtaposed with something really raw,” Viguier says. “To create a sense of kinship with everything—and everyone.”
And that’s where Resurrection comes in. Yes, he points out, the word has religious connotations. But the interpretation he’s taking is the sense of optimistically facing the future, no matter how bad things have been. Like many designers who’ve entered the industry in the last few years, Viguier is finding ways to express his wildest and deepest creative impulses with a meaningful commitment to taking responsibility as a designer—in his case, the way he has quietly and un-showily moved upcycling to take center stage at his atelier. “Creatively, all of that traveling, moving internationally [we used to do]...that’s not a good asset,” he says. “What I am doing now...it’s more than local—it’s using what’s in the four walls of my studio. We are all going to have to deal with where we are in a real way very soon. That’s resurrection.”
