Night had already fallen over the Palais Royal gardens by the time the Isabel Marant show kicked off, but the French designer brought the sunset right back with a lineup of beach babes clad in breezy shapes in strong pastel hues.
Marant took her cues from 1990s images by Swiss fashion photographer Hans Feurer. “I really love to see all those sporty, healthy girls with a lot of skin, a lot of beachwear,” she said before the show.
Cue windbreakers that just touch oversize, worn over swimwear-style tops and barely there shorts; parachute silk jumpsuits and roomy trousers with rolled up cuffs; cute blousons and pretty lace separates, all in a palette that ran from pinks and oranges in tequila sunrise combinations, to blues and frothy whites.
Standing out were a pair of white looks that paired delicate-looking lace with transparent floral technical fabric. Marant pointed out that mix as being the epitome of her season.
Dotted throughout were bags and accessories like lighter holder pendants — Marant admitted to being an unrepentant smoker. It was also the first official outing of her eyewear line, launched just before the pandemic. It was these additions that gave her sporty silhouettes their men’s or women’s reading.
The sporty cuts themselves played with an in-between handsomeness. “I’ve always loved masculinity in women and femininity in men. That’s actually how it works out with my husband [the accessories designer Jerome Dreyfuss] because we are similar in sizes, we are always taking each other’s clothes,” she said.
With that tidbit, Marant drove home the fact that while she has her recipe down to an art, she has the nous to sprinkle it with exactly what is needed to make it of-the-moment.
