It was 9:30 p.m. on a Friday and the crowd in the Fourth Arrondissement was a pulsating mass of bodies, crushed together and shoving forward, on the edge of out of control. Security guards were yelling and trying to shut a pair of ornate iron gates to limit entry, and guests desperate to get in were yelling right back.
Not for a rock concert, or a club. For a fashion show.
But then, for many, Marine Serre is a lot more. One of the first designers to take on climate change and elevate upcycling to a wearable art, she is a sort of evangelist prophet, sitting in the glowing center where value systems, clothes and identity meet. And she has spawned her own obsessive, fashion-centric group of acolytes.
For them, her work isn’t just nice stuff to wear. It’s an expression of who they are (or want to be); a passport to a society of the like-minded. Increasingly, more and more people want in. As the scrum at the door demonstrated.
It’s just too bad the moment outside was so ugly. Because inside the gallery where her show was held, audience glued willy-nilly against the walls, the clothes themselves were terrific.
Serre has, in the past, been given to a sort of dystopian doom (understandable, given her subject matter), but this time around she had lightened up, in a way that made the social and ecological underpinnings of her work even more compelling.
Increasingly sophisticated amalgamations of old tartan scarves and houndstooth, of cheerful fair isle and argyle knits, were given post-punk life as chic pencil skirt suits and sweater dresses, as if former punks had cocked an amused eyebrow in the mirror and decided to go to the ball. One trailing gown was made from a pastiche of grunge-era T-shirts. There were camo-damask corsets mixed up with household linens, and anoraks quilted out of regenerated toile de Jouy.
They were awfully pretty. But it’s the fact that they are mostly made from the detritus of the wasted world — that they tell a story of reinvention, and possibility — that gives them their gravitational pull. That has created a dedicated band of followers.
It happens, in fashion, every once in awhile, when a designer succeeds in rewriting the status quo. Even now, when corporate demands and quarterly results have become part of the culture, and market research has penetrated deep into the design mind.
It’s the sort of passionate infatuation that not so long ago attached itself to Vetements, the anti-fashion fashion brand started by Demna and Guram Gvasalia that disrupted the big brands of Paris back around 2015, drawing its own bands of dedicated fans to grunge venues in far-flung parts of the city and launching Demna into the style stratosphere as designer of Balenciaga.–NYT
