The Class of 2023 might have been the most impacted by the pandemic as lockdowns started about the same time as the second semester of their first year would have started, but the B.A. graduates of the Institut Français de la Mode seemed to have moved on.
“They don’t speak at all about COVID,” reports Hervé Yvrenogeau—who with Thierry Rondenet, co-directs the school’s Fashion Design program. Well not with words, anyway. As we saw at the student shows in New York, many graduates produced designs that create a space around the body, preventing close contact. Dissociation and fragmentation are understandable reactions to an uncertain future, but this class also seemed to want to stitch things together. One student even sent a couple down the runway in an outfit for two with a shared leg.
E. M. Forster’s oft-quoted line “only connect” could be a motto for some of the more outstanding student collections presented by the IFM students. Lucie Savarin addressed an often overlooked audience, working with occupational therapists and those with restricted mobility to design hybrid garments such as backpack pants and a dress with a cupholder, that can be worn by people with and without disabilities.
There was emotion in the soft drapes of the collection by Natanël Bennefla-Paris who poured through family photographs and browsed library books to try to construct roots to his Algerian heritage. Manfredi Bettoni, from Italy, channeled his passion for workwear into a lineup that explored the Ametora phenomenon, or an interest in traditional American style that dates to 1950s Japan. Denim played a big part in Bettoni’s designs, as it did in those by Céleste Clédat’s rave-inspired pieces, many with ombre treatments that recalled the dark interiors of warehouses turned dance clubs. Music also influenced Robin Mayet’s collection, with its “beats” rendered in shades of black, gray, and white.
Heritage, technique, and gender all came together in the collection of Zixiang He, who used natural dyes (soil, plant, and mold) and traditional Chinese knotting to challenge norms of dress. Also tying things up was Clémentine Thevoux Chabuel whose models wore hand-crocheted sneakers with playful sheep-adorned designs that bring together such disparate threads as family history, the Corsican landscape, and Snoop Dogg. Peacocks, rather than sheep, were the subject of Inès Lodter’s Dandy 2.0 collection, which she dedicated to her father.
The collection of Anna Suisse was designed for six dreamt-up and stereotypical characters—from “The Cute Thief” to the “Heartbreaker”—who she imagined attending a party in whimsical deconstructed clothes and accessories, including a theme-appropriate embroidered tablecloth. Home textiles also made an appearance in the romantic and responsible designs of Jade Blévin. Her muse was a mythological character, Nausicaӓ, who the described as “the perfect embodiment of the ecofeminist movement.” Apart from a few khaki workwear pieces her frothy collection was rendered in shades of white. Calais lace donated by the heritage dentellière Jean Pascal Laude, with whom Blevin has worked, was used on dreamy lingerie- and bridal-inspired dresses.
