Praise this digital moment in fashion all you want, but there really is a reason we’ve been running around Paris all these years looking at clothes in person. On a video call from their rue François 1er studio, Lisi Herrebrugh and Rushemy Botter did their best to illustrate through a screen the clever techniques that defined their Nina Ricci pre-collection. You’d never realize from looking at the pictures, but each look was “a total look,” as Herrebrugh said, with single garments collaged from several deconstructed ones. A look that read like a skirt and a jacket, for example, was actually one single coat.
A trench coat with a built-in contrast-color underpinning looked like three separate pieces. (If the idea of only wearing a coat out triggered flasher associations, Botter said he’d recommend styling it with a skintight roll-neck underneath.) But that wasn’t all. Inspired by the illusions of those contraptions, the designers conjured trompe l’oeil effects within their materials. In one case, a panel on a Prince of Wales check coat was overlaid in georgette, creating a sense of filtrage that tricked the optics. In another case, they had printed the pattern and wool effect of check onto a richer, more fluid fabric to dupe the eye.
Herrebrugh and Botter attributed their ideas to Nina Ricci’s postwar brand identity. “Not that you can compare this to a postwar period, but we do have to deal with less fabrics,” Botter said, referring to the broken supply chain that has defined the past year in fashion. This collection, of course, was hardly make-do and mend, as Herrebrugh pointed out, “but more of a design idea: a choice.” Conceptually, it summed up many of the themes that have defined our lives recently, from the practical and comfortable approaches to dressing inspired by lockdown, to the reality versus artifice narrative we’re constantly confronted with in the digital age. In real life, the illusions of the garments would have been revealed. Through a screen, they were entirely deceptive.
