It s been a big couple of weeks for Maxime Simoëns. Late last month, LVMH announced that it had purchased a minority stake in his label, and today Simoëns unveiled his first ready-to-wear collection, following several seasons of only doing couture. That s heady stuff for a young designer, but judging from Simoëns manner backstage after his show this afternoon, he was handling the pressure with aplomb. The looks on the runway, too, revealed very few jitters: If this wasn t a groundbreaking collection, it was one that was executed with a lot of finesse.
Simoëns inspiration this season was Swan Lake, a theme he extrapolated in a few literal ways, including short, flared skirt silhouettes redolent of tutus, and plumage-like textured fur. But the most intriguing work here found the designer making the sideways leap from the ballet s opposition of black swan and white swan to houndstooth checks with an interlocked opposition of black and white. He followed the idea through by extracting a single check, and using that shape as a graphic motif in clothes that were vibrantly colored. A group of evening pieces, with the check shape etched in metallic embroidery, was particularly well done. The show could have used a tighter edit, though. On the one hand, you sometimes felt that Simoëns was working his houndstooth theme a little too insistently, and on the other, there were more than a handful of pieces that seemed off-topic, like gowns and cocktail frocks scattered with marble crystal.
More generally, the qualm here had to do with Simoëns silhouettes, which weren t daring enough to make much of an impact. That tentativeness was made up for, to a degree, by the designer s nervier use of materials—the standouts were his featherlike fur and sparkly blue and black velvet. But on the whole this collection came off a little bit shy. Perhaps there were a few jitters, after all.
