Abraham Ortuño Perez—Abra, for those who know him—is an endearingly nostalgic designer. His label, named after this personal nickname, is an autobiographical project: Each season the Spaniard looks at his past, in particular his own relationship with fashion, as source material for his collections.
Ortuño Perez said over the phone on Friday that for his fall show, which effectively kicked off the Paris leg of the Fashion Week circuit this afternoon, he reminisced on the times in which he’d tag along with his mother to go shopping for a special occasion. “We would go to these boutiques for her to find a look, and they used to always say that the clothes were ‘from Paris,’” said the designer. “They made you feel like you were buying the most special thing,” he continued with a giggle, “it’s this whole feeling of being from a small town and buying something imported, something from Paris!”
Cut to a decade and change later, Ortuño Perez is making those soon-to-be imported, fantasy-inducing clothes and putting them on Parisian runways. But rather than transform this adorable childhood memory into a self-aggrandizing experiment, he took to creating a collection that would evoke the same feeling of sartorial wanderlust, of wanting to dress and look like those sophisticated city folk do in big fashion capitals, that he and his mother used to feel in those same “fashion boutiques,” as they were often called. (Which is not the name of this collection, he remarked, “but it’s not not the name of the collection.”)
The result of this trip down memory lane was a playful lineup of inventive machinations that displayed Ortuño Perez’s amusing ingenuity and his charming sincerity. He said that the idea was to take all the “hits from a small town boutique” and make them for the woman who’d fantasize about wearing them—a fashion lover, not a victim. A starting point was considering what storefront mannequins would be dressed in back in the late ’80s and early ’90s when he’d visit these stores: “Super glam” frocks in decadent metallic lames, power shoulder tailoring, fabulous furs. He delivered that and then some.
The show opened with a two-puncher of faux fur coats that transformed his models into human-sized roses—there have been fur textures on almost every runway this season, but leave it to Ortuño Perez’s childlike wonder to finally deliver an interpretation that draws outside the lines. Also cool were a run of twofer coats, some in fur and others in gabardine and suiting, that riffed off the ’80s Working Girl silhouette but modernized it with rounded shoulders and leggings in lieu of pencil skirts. Denim jackets and a trench coat were cut with their backsides as the fronts and left open in the back, and a couple of terrific cropped leather jackets were worn with catsuits as a 2020s step-up from that Jane Fonda workout tape vibe.
Even if he’s been making ready-to-wear collections for around six years now, Ortuño Perez’s clothes have until recently come across mostly as a vehicle to contextualize his best-selling accessories (you can’t look down these days in New York or Paris without clocking his satin ballet flat sneakers). But that’s no more. Consider the trio of lamé dresses that closed the show: One deftly draped to unravel around the body, another cut asymmetrical and with a funky crinoline skirt, and a third featuring a fabulous skirt of ruffles of all different lengths. They’re the kind of frocks—imported or not—that “fashion boutiques” would rush to put in their storefronts to attract some honest-to-goodness fashion true believers.
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