It didn’t matter that Louis Gabriel Nouchi held his show up a long rickety stairwell in a space as raw as a construction site at 8pm—probably it made it even better for the packed LGN crowd who were surging outside desperate to get in. Some of that scene—the fandom, the grittiness, and something about the dark minimalism and assertive marching of the models—almost felt nostalgic, a bit like underground show haunts of the Belgians and Helmut Lang in Paris in the 1990s.
Perhaps there’s a connection there. Nouchi is a graduate of the educational Belgian powerhouse that is La Cambre school in Brussels. Fellow alumni are Olivier Theyskens, Anthony Vaccarello, Matthieu Blazy, Julien Dossena, and Nicolas di Felice, an illustrious force throughout fashion. Nouchi also learned his stuff with Raf Simons. What’s for sure: His proven ability to cut slick tailoring and edgy thong-bodies has clearly attracted an enthusiastic contingent of young Parisians and the menswear fraternity around him.
Nouchi always starts by taking a novel as a starting point to explore masculinities: American Psycho and A Single Man in the past couple of seasons. This time, he’d picked Maupassant’s Bel Ami, a 19th century story, he explained, which depicts “an arriviste” who ruthlessly uses women to climb to power. “So it gave us the idea to do women’s wear for the first time,” he said. “And because we had lots of women already as customers, we wanted to do that for a long time. But,” he added, his own plot is rewritten from a feminist supporting viewpoint. “Because the LGN girl, she’s as fierce as we are.”
