Somehow, in getting to the Atlein show, I took a wrong turn. Designer Antonin Tron has been showing at the same venue, a cavernous room under the Bambini restaurant at the Palais de Tokyo, for seasons now. But when someone asked me if I was going to the show I nodded, followed her directions and walked the opposite way and down the stairs to end up… amidst a bunch of kids who were indeed putting on a show. They were dressed in disintegrating tourist tees, and f-ked up Britney denim, and feathery angel’s wings, and enormous sweatshirts held together with a wing, a prayer, and a truck load of metal chain links. It was a good looking crowd, actually; they were parading around outside, shrieking, having fun—and making fashion whatever they wanted it to be.
You could say, and I will say, that these days, for most designers—those working independently and without the safety net of the conglomerates with their endlessly deep pockets—fashion is an act of intense self belief; that you’ve got to just soldier on, if you can, to pursue what you really believe in. Which is where Tron comes in. His Atlein has been an exercise time after time in honing and perfecting his craft, and thinking intelligently about what inspires him to design. That—and the way Tron always pushes his superlative draping and twisting of fabric into quite unearthly beauty—makes him, for me, essential watching.
Backstage, moments before his show, Tron mentioned what was on his mind for fall. He’d been thinking about the ancient depiction of Venuses—symbols of fertility, of matriarchal power—and how long lost communities were often female led, a fact history has been less than ready to acknowledge; “archaeology is politics,” he said. From there, he took to thinking about the curvilinear forms and bulging volumes of Brancusi—and then the elaborate twisted head wraps of Madame Grès. “It always comes back to her in some way,” Tron said.
All of which means that for Atlein next season, the basis is a sinuous rendering of sheer and opaque fabrics—jersey, chiffon, satin—rendered in their most liquid forms, contorted and spun (torsade was the word Tron used) to form bodies and ankle length skirts; exquisite reductiveness shot through with a kind of defiance, and colored in everything from claret to kelp to anthracite to black.
Adding to this were lustrous satiny faux down or wool flannel jackets cinched at the waist to within an inch of their lives. Tron deployed brown fake fur for a belted teddy coat or to line a voluminous bomber. There were slithery black lacquered leather effect pants, the draping effortless in a way that suggested it actually takes real skill to make something look that easy. And speaking of easy, or not, the most perfect gray tee came out, partnered with a pale green draped skirt. Like, a really, utterly, perfect tee: one sleeve was twisted up and onto the shoulder. It was both a technical feat and the alchemical magic of taking the most prosaic of garments and turning it into pure fashion.
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