One of the interesting elements of the global pandemic’s razing of the fashion industry has been the pause in churn. The entire system is built on sale periods and stock volume, so that when one season is tapering off, another – usually a capsule or pre-collection – comes in to the fill the gaps in store. Now, as brands present their new collections at new-look ‘fashion weeks’, they have to adjust to the fact that last season hasn’t yet sold through. Essentially, after months of record-low sales, there isn’t much space on the rails for newness.
“Because stores have been closed for so long, there is less of a need for huge collections. That’s just the truth,” says Kris Van Assche, creative director of leather-centric luxury brand Berluti via video conference from his studio in Paris. He was presenting looks and key pieces from a new collection made in collaboration with American ceramicist Brian Rochefort, the first time he has joined forces with another party on ready-to-wear. Van Assche’s time at Berluti have perhaps been defined by his extensive use of bold colour, and this partnership has yielded suitably dazzling results.
The collection sees patterns from Rochefort’s proto-naturalistic works – inspired by volcanoes and exotic plants – printed onto louche, new-luxury apparel. The collection should have been bigger, but the effects of the pandemic meant it needed to shrink a little. Van Assche is a self-professed ‘ceramics nerd’, so he was keen to keep as much of the collection as possible, but sad that it wouldn’t be seen in the usual way. A fashion show, he says, is pretty much the only way to unveil luxury clothing.
“Fashion shows are about emotion, about real people wearing the clothes, the music, the atmosphere, the venue… even waiting 20 minutes for it to start,” he says. “All that energy comes from a live event. Reproducing that in video, I don’t really see the point. Luxury needs to be touched, needs to be seen for real.”
It was rare to get one-on-one time with a creative director of Van Assche’s stature, and invaluable to hear him describe the intricacies of the project himself – something that, as he says, is hard to portray in image alone. Luckily, the show was replaced with an in-conversation video in which the designer and the artist pick apart the parallels of their respective disciplines.
Back on Zoom, he describes Rochefort as a ‘bad boy’ of ceramics, and that only after two years at Berluti, having got his head around the codes and traditions of the brand, did he feel ready to bring that kind of energy into the design studio. “Now that the character is clear, the silhouette is clear and kind of defined it was OK to bring in another element,” he remembers. “In fact, it was really exciting.”
Rochefort’s work involves searing colour, extensive layering and the creation of patina, which is why it serves as the perfect bedfellow for Berluti, explains Van Assche. “A brown is never just a brown,” he says. “A brown is an accumulation of 25 shades of brown. A red is the same.” Reinterpreting ceramic art in clothing seems like no mean feat, but they have done it admirably. Rochefort’s cornea-melting colours and primal textures seem to pop even more when the motifs are used in clothing. Shirts, in particular, are the very definition of ‘loud’, and yet there’s a Riviera elegance to everything. An insouciance that ceramics could never create, perhaps.
Van Assche doesn’t mask his lamentation for the loss of actual fashion shows and looks forward to a time when the traditional catwalk will ride again. But you get the sense he is cautiously optimistic of how clothing will be presented in the future, and how designers and brands will have to adapt their creative capacity season to season.
“In the future we will all be judged on our capacity of adaptation, of flexibility,” he predicts. “Now it’s July, nobody really knows what’s going to happen in January. I’ve been working for 22 years and the system has never really changed. There has never been a moment when they whole world came to a stop and we needed to reinvent ourselves.”
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