Fashion is a mirror that can reflect pretty much anything. Yet as a commercial art form, it is nearly always also about one thing: money. Over the last seven years, Marine Serre has emerged from the fringes as an independent woman designer to build a globally recognized brand based upon the pillars of sustainability, community, and feminism. Today she worked to inject those values into the money-minded heart of the Paris fashion-industrial complex.
She signaled this by hosting her show at the Seine-side Monnaie de Paris, a site that has minted France’s money since the 9th Century. Serre also commissioned the mint to strike her own currency—a “talisman,” she called it— which was in the form of a coin stamped with the designer’s crescent moon symbol on one side, and a portrait of Serre after Marianne, symbol of the French Republic, on the other. One of these was handed to each guest. “I want to make Marine Serre more radical, but also more refined,” said the designer.
This collection featured several diverting side stories which almost felt like strategic feints. The red curtains of the runway space were, Serre said, a tribute to David Lynch via reference to the Twin Peaks red room. The catsuit in upcycled motorcycle leathers nodded to Irma Vep. A dress crafted from upcycled link watch straps and another peppered with Serre’s coins were time versus money trade-offs. An oversized down coat clad in recycled nylon sateen was a nod to Vogue’s late, great, editor-at-large André Leon Talley. The soundtrack (which powerfully reminded me of the Akira theme) was embedded with statements about freedom of speech.
Beneath all that entertainingly episodic noise was a constant baseline that took us back to Serre’s mission to refine. The waisted leather looks that opened through to a single-fastening Le Smoking via boxy black tailoring (layered over tiger stripe base layers for a little of the designer’s trademark irreverence) were efforts to apply the brand’s non-conformist philosophy to a more conventionally powerful wardrobe aesthetic.
Fitted day dresses were belted with shirtsleeves from the garments they had been upcycled out of. The matelot (sailor) suit looks and a fur coat made from upcycled classics were further references to essential haute-bourgeois stereotypes. Highlight of the closing eveningwear section was an ivory dress made from irregularly compressed upcycled vintage silk nightgowns. “Fashion for me is about archetypes,” Serre offered. This collection saw Serre operate like a fashion Trojan Horse, venturing deep into the canon of Parisian uptown archetypes in order to dose it with the imprint of her infectious rebel spirit. It was a declaration of maturity, and simultaneously also of refusal to ever grow out of the convictions that have taken her this far.
Original Source: Read More Here
