Nicolas Ghesquière’s spring 2012 Balenciaga show will be remembered as the one where the benches collapsed, forcing guests to stand as the collection came streaming past. Charlotte Chesnais and Marte Mei van Haaster hold it dear for an entirely different reason: It’s the show where the jewelry designer and the model met each other.
Van Haaster was in her debut season, taking a gap year between the Royal Academy of Arts and Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Holland. “I was a baby, like a little Bambi with my knees trembling, and I was observing what people were making. I probably asked Charlotte ‘how did you do this?’ I was a curious teenager.” Chesnais, who was not much older, was responsible for the fashion jewelry at Balenciaga, among other responsibilities; that season the ergonomic cuff bracelets in clear glass and orange resin that crawled up the models’ forearms were her designs. “We got on well and we never cut the link,” Chesnais says. “And when I launched my brand almost 10 years ago, I wanted to work with [the photographer] Viviane Sassen and Marte was on board [to model].”
In the years since, van Haaster has appeared in multiple Charlotte Chesnais campaigns and on countless runways, but she’s as much a designer herself as she is a model, working across mediums that include ceramics and blown glass and building a practice “centered around allyship with nature.” A visit to her website led to an internet deep dive about the Symbiocene, a hypothesized time period that sees a reintegration between humans and the rest of nature that will hopefully play out very differently than the Anthropocene era we are currently living in.
It’s Chesnais and van Haaster’s mutual inclination toward organic shapes that brought them together for this project. “The Shima collection that Charlotte made for this season is so complementary to my aesthetic, it was the perfect time to collaborate,” van Haaster says. Shima means island in Japanese, and the designs evoke shells and Chesnais’s early influences Jean Arp and Barbara Hepworth in equal measure. The new pieces incorporate van Haaster’s blown glass charms and Chesnais’s sculptural metal work. “Being more in the art field, it’s been really inspiring to see how to run a design business. Because Charlotte can run a design business!” laughs van Haaster. “I find her as a woman business owner a super big inspiration.”
Shop the collection on Chesnais’s website and at her stores in Paris: 10 rue d’Alger and 169 boulevard Saint Germain.
