Held over from January’s Pitti courtesy of Omicron, tonight’s third collection but first live presentation of the rebooted Ann Demeulemeester was shown in the Réfectoire des Cordeliers. This moody Gothic remnant—once one of Paris’s most-used show spaces—was Demeulemeester’s venue of choice before she exited the label back in 2013: She returned to its mournful walls this evening to see how brand savior Claudio Antonioli’s design team is interpreting her source code.
The Réfectoire has been unromantically renovated recently—its new wooden floor looks like that of an ostensibly upscale airport coffee shop—and thus the space’s authentic 700-year-old gloom has been tangibly suppressed. This collection, too, looked like a careful renovation that focused on the surface without considering enough the atmosphere. “Good fashion is like rock music: all anarchy and revolt,” is a line ascribed to Demeulemeester. This evening, however, there was no anarchy, no revolt.
It looked like the team had studied the archives, identified some recurring motifs, and then gone all-in on repeating them ad nauseam. What that gave us was long-skirted oversized jackets in boiled wool, slim-fitted deep V-neck dresses, trenches, and then garments that combined or layered the three. The two signature elements were the strapping—of course—and the high-cut single vent at the back of the garments, whose height depended on modesty and what the garments were: Outerwear venting went to the vertebrae; dresses were vented to the buttock. The colors started in black then gradually expanded into blackish navy and blackish aubergine. The models all looked like they were heading to a meeting with their bank managers to declare themselves bankrupt, but romantically so.
Designers with the rigidly individual signature of Demeulemeester or her close aesthetic cousin Yamamoto don’t change in order to keep abreast with the tastes of time. Instead, the tastes of time constantly change and just occasionally coincide with theirs: It’s that “even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day” factor. Yet now, when Demeulemeester’s intellectual-depressive-poetic aesthetic makes sense again, the team should be ready to declare it with more fervor.
