Fluid tailoring, soft minimalism, drapey elegance—whatever it is that we’re seeing emerging as this summer’s menswear consensus, Bianca Saunders has tuned right into it. What’s interesting about her is that she’s been going this way, with her youthful sophistication for some seasons. Her very particular talent is for tweaking, recutting, and draping shapes which once had a generic template (a business suit, a tracksuit, jeans, pajamas) until all the oldness and ordinariness is wiped clean away and replaced with her relaxed, but never sloppy, sense of dressing smartly.
Saunders is British-Jamaican, showing in Paris for the second time thanks to the fact that she won the Andam Prize last year (a condition that comes with the French award, although she still lives and works in London). She said she’d based part of her aesthetic on a metaphor about Hard Food, a staple of Jamaican cookery. “It’s starchy foods like yams, bananas, and plantains which start off completely hard, and then become soft when they’re boiled down. So I used that as a concept: the contrasts of textures that are hard in some places and soft in others.”
What appears to be simple at a distance, or from front-on, often turns out to be different, or has an unexpected detail in profile, or in the back. A matter of curved, twisted seams to add volume to jeans, a pinched drape on one side of a satin pajama suit, or the buttonless form of a tailored jacket which is actually what she calls “a pullover.”
It’s a point of pride that it’s taken her time to work out these pattern points, and that she’s evolving them season by season. An example is the signature set-in shoulder line which began as a boxy, padded silhouette in her spring ’21 collection. This time it re-manifested, reduced and unpadded, in the jacket of a luxurious white suit with raw-edged sleeves and pocket details. Luxurious indeed: she said she’d bought the fabric from LVMH’s deadstock platform Nona (on which it resells leftovers from its haute couture brands).
The model wearing it was also carrying an orange version of a clutch bag from Saunders’s new collaboration with Ecco leather; part of a collective design project for the company, alongside Natacha Ramsay-Levi and others. The effect? Well, it was chic.
