Ever since Boramy Viguier launched his eponymous menswear label in 2018, the Parisian designer has offered clothes with a beguiling and brilliant, mystical-spiritual, medieval bent. There has been a poetic fusion of monastic robing, techno performancewear, and nontraditional tailoring actually constructed in the most traditional of ways; Viguier certainly understands the inner mysteries of what makes a jacket function perfectly. It has all been a little like the sartorial equivalent of Umberto Eco reading the Tarot.
Who knows what Signor Eco would have divined about Viguier’s decision to launch a women’s collection for spring 2021, with its compelling and rather terrific mix of shimmering floral coats, Victorian silk shirting, and anoraks printed with the Tarot cups symbol. What’s for sure is that fate certainly played its part in this launch. After all, he’s hardly alone in pursuing new creative leads after months and months of an unexpected lockdown. Perhaps Raf Simons, a designer of a different generation than Viguier, but one who equally sees menswear from unexpected perspectives, felt the same compulsion, given he recently announced that he was launching women’s this October.
Still, in this day and age, why are we even talking about gendered labels? Plenty of women are now snapping up Bode New York or Martine Rose. And—let’s gaze into a crystal ball for a second—after their strong offerings for next spring, many more are likely to do so with Priya Ahluwalia or Kenneth Nicholson. Yet Viguier, a sensitive and thoughtful designer, while emphasizing the aesthetic congruence of his different collections, also knows his womenswear requires a mental shift of sorts. “It’s a creative challenge,” he said quite recently during a collection preview. “I wanted to extend my design language, to see what would happen. Though all of these pieces do have a strong connection to menswear construction.”
That’s the takeaway here. No one ever wants to see menswear designers thinking they’re speaking to women by giving them what they think are “feminine clothes.” In Viguier’s collection, what looks like skirts or dresses are actually outerwear pieces of different lengths worn atop one another. The rest of the time he partners his pieces with a niftily cut cargo-style pant near identical to the one he does for men, and it’s to be presumed that it’s intended to be worn with everything here. Ultimately what unifies his men’s and his women’s is the way they draw on the same font of a particularly idiosyncratic and heartfelt notion of minimalism—a minimalism which has thus far been playing throughout so much of what’s going to be on offer for next spring.
