Fall tends to be Marie-Christine Statz’s season, and with this outing she seemed to have newfound confidence.
“Lots of people are talking about women at the moment, what we want and how we want things,” she said backstage before the show, adding that she wanted to explore the dialogue between softness and hardness as expressions of character, while also delving deeper into various facets of what we say through clothing.
Her main talking point was a subtle formalization of casual dress, with a nod to neo-Brutalism and Bauhaus. Tailoring is Statz’s strong suit, and here she offered up jackets that, while ample, skewed less boxy than in recent seasons, plus several workhorse pieces in leather, both real and faux—a vegan leather coat, for example, combined attitude with lightness and ease of wear. The knitwear, here worked into body-skimming columns, seemed to bow to the rules of tailoring as well. Even her new triangular pouch bag came with a deliberate twist, just to keep it from being too structured, the designer explained.
Panels that can trail or wrap is a salient trend in Paris this season. One Gauchere version is a free-floating lapel on a black tuxedo coat; another wraps like a scarf on an overcoat in soft gray wool. Statz also gamely fused the padding trend with transparency on a pale yellow funnel neck number, worked it into leather trim on a sleeveless black knit top, and sent out a couple of padded, quilted skirts that sit squarely on the hipbones. Just how those trends land—here and elsewhere—remains to be seen, but when it comes to dressing for life out there in the real world, Gauchere’s take is as convincing as any.
