As keen divers, the lockdown period has been testing for Lisi Herrebrugh and Rushemy Botter. It’s been two years since their last plunge into the deep blue off the Caribbean island of Curaçao where Botter grew up, and where the couple have established the Botter Coral Nursery, funded through their eponymous menswear label. During an appointment in their Rue François 1er showroom, the designers said their Nina Ricci resort collection had probably sprung from their longing for the turquoise sea.
“We wanted to link more to our world where we feel free, and look less at the archive. We wanted to listen to our intuition,” Herrebrugh explained as a model walked by in a wetsuit transformed into a bouclé skirt suit, a wavy zip evoking the way aquatic-wear wraps around the body. Exercised throughout the collection, the diving motif drew direct lines to the way the designers express themselves in their menswear. It inevitably made for a more personal experience. “We love the underwater world,” Botter said, and that aesthetic is entirely individual to this duo.
The properties of dive suits—both historical and contemporary—made for technically interesting and quite flattering lines, like those of a jacket with an intricate panel structure that concealed its closure, or little wetsuit-inspired turtleneck knits with fronts cut like razorbacks executed super lightweight. Tailoring played with the codes of beachwear in wraparound skorts and board short suits, which Botter said was a proposal for “a new suit” in this post-pandemic era of ease. And while it would have been tempting to throw in a scuba number or two, the designers didn’t want to be obvious.
Between tuba snorkeling heels, abstract coral prints inspired by the florals of kitschy tourist board shorts, and the dégradé sunrise/sundown color formations printed on both garments and bags, you’d be inclined to call this a holiday collection. For Herrebrugh and Botter, however, tropical beach and sea life feels more like home than some exotic, post-pandemic “revenge travel” postcard. That’s why this collection embodied the intuition they were talking about. Authentic to their own world, it’s a direction they believe in for Nina Ricci. “It’s a story we’ll keep on telling,” Herrebrugh vowed.
