In the storied salons of the Nina Ricci headquarters on rue Francois 1er, its millennial designer duo had a generational confession to make: They use their phones for all kinds of creative tasks, including sketching. “They’re not beautiful sketches. Just quick things,” Lisi Herrebrugh noted, while her partner Rushemy Botter added that he does observe “old school” procedures, too. In contrast, perhaps, to some members of the Paris establishment, these young designers’ natural relationships with their phones were what made this season’s digital show format so instinctive to them.
They presented their Nina Ricci collection through the (imagined) recorded screen of an iPhone, scrolling the viewer through their research process, from Google searches to YouTube clips and exchanges on iMessage. What it didn’t reveal was the actual inspiration behind the collection: L’Air du Temps, the institutional fragrance Nina Ricci launched after the Second World War. Light and elegant, it cut a decided contrast to the dense perfumes of the old world. “It was a message of hope, optimism, and revival. That’s what we wanted to bring with this collection,” Herrebrugh said.
Its flacon, designed by the Art Nouveau glass artist René Lalique, informed the cuts, colors, and movements of dresses. They had the inimitable touch of this designer duo: a splicing between the couture heritage of Nina Ricci and the swimwear techniques that are their personal obsession. The nature of that marriage—not unlike L’Air du Temps itself—is confrontational, but Herrebrugh and Botter are sticking to their guns and continuing to refine their take on Nina Ricci.
If the designers had felt the winds of change during their break in quarantine—spent with Botter’s parents in a Dutch village—it was expressed in a comfort-centric approach to their otherwise highly architectural tailoring. They removed its frames of confinement from the body and built its structure so it felt as if it was floating around the physique. Then, they imbued it with various adaptable features. A sleeveless blazer was hacked in half at the front so its top part could be worn hanging off the back, attached to a built-in swimsuit-like body.
“I feel like there’s a balance in this collection between our tailoring background and the codes of the house. We’re finding our own fluidity,” Herrebrugh said, referring to the menswear label they run on the side, which carries Botter’s name and earned them the Nina Ricci gig in the first place. Ironically, the most unassuming garment made the biggest impact: a tech-y pleated translucent blue blouse, which had the digital lightness expressed in the meeting between iPhones and the L’Air du Temps flacon. It was quite hypnotizing. Much like both of those inventions, the simplest designs are often the most enduring.
L’Air du Temps, by the way, is the perfume Hannibal Lecter picks up on Clarice Starling’s skin in The Silence of the Lambs. “You use Evian skin cream, and sometimes you wear L’Air du Temps, but not today,” he tells her, his eyes all sparkly and blue. Perhaps one day, we will sum up the events of 2020 in the eternal words of Agent Starling, her postalveolar fricative consonants key for pronunciation: “Scared at first; then…exhilarated.”
