Fashion week doesn’t come cheap. More and more brands are vanishing from the schedule like socks in a dryer, testing new ways to sneak their collections into our eyeballs. Take it from Sacai, busy indulging its love for PDFs. Marine Serre decided to follow the trend, only she added a little Da Vinci cameo. Why settle for a simple lookbook when you can make it Louvre-collab casual?
“The Louvre has always been a source of inspiration for Marine Serre, a universe of forms, a matrix of symbols and myths, a parade of icons that imprint, like afterimages, the contemporary silhouettes she creates for her fashion House. It is this relationship with the Musée, the archive, the collections, and history that illuminates this collaboration, at the convergence of two creative worlds: the Musée and the workshop, the painter’s gesture and the couturier’s hand,” the label noted. Very fitting for this year’s Met Gala theme, if you ask me.
The Louvre inspiration found its way into five pieces out of thirty in total. The mini La Joconde dress, of course, is the one to make you realize you actually want, maybe even need, to give the garments a second glance. When you do, you’ll notice it’s a molded puzzle that took 420 hours to make, which, frankly, shows. Then came an embroidered mesh maxi covered in almost 500 brushes, which in an alternate reality could easily double as a mermaid’s very hairy tail. Next in line was a mini bustier dress made of recycled paint tubes, and if you think that’s an unexpected material, wait until you hear about the one made entirely out of watch faces. Last came the “Flemish Painter’s Dress,” crafted from the waist down out of literal painter’s shirts. Fashion, after all, has always had a soft spot for the art world.
The rest of the collection, titled “The Grace of Time,” stayed firmly in Marine Serre territory, drawing from that very specific space between past and present. Upcycled T-shirts, silk scarves, regenerated canvas and sculpted jersey formed the backbone, proving once again that the house’s recycling habit isn’t going anywhere. The brand’s signature moon print sneaked up on a big part of the collection, while body-hugging fabrics clung, stretched and occasionally revealed how the garments were put together in the first place, before our eyes landed on volumes. For a moment at least, a museum and a wardrobe end up speaking the same language.
