This season marked Christopher Esber’s first fall outing on the official PFW calendar. As the grand prize winner of the 2024 ANDAM Fashion Award, the designer has been spending more time getting to know the French capital and relishing his newfound access to the vast array of materials, embellishments, and specialized artisans that ANDAM and Paris can offer.
Backstage before the show, Esber said his starting point was flamenco—its history, gestures, and attitudes. Then, somewhat incongruously, he decided to fuse that with new developments gleaned from Art Deco interiors whose opulence somehow beckoned him down a decadent path to shibari, the Japanese art of bondage.
“I was thinking about the women of that time, the spaces they lived in, the curtains, the cords that pull the curtains open, the surfaces,” the designer offered by way of explanation. “I was finding ways to create constraint yet also have space and find the common thread between those three elements.”
Improbable as it may sound, the gambit mostly worked. The designer tends to do “easy” more handily than strict, and here he aligned a brand built on beachy Australian glamour with the gilded salons of Paris and other cosmopolitan world capitals.
Esber opened with a leather dress, its skirt hiked up to show more leg, a sly way of announcing the brand’s new belt category. From there, he said he tried to consider drape and tailoring in equal measure, adding a lashing of movement through fringe. Some looks took inspiration from upholstery fabrications—for example, on an orange-dominant deconstructed sweater and a pencil skirt that really popped. But he really excelled with numbers based on humble staples and simple shapes—a striped shirt with jeans, corduroy, a black jacket, a caftan in watery tortoiseshell georgette—elevated by craft. Macramé, crochet, passementerie, and shimmying fringe made many of these pieces feel special, as did more of-this-moment knitted chains or a pileup of silver piercings along the back seams of a black jacket.
As this year Paris celebrates the centenary of the Art Deco movement, a handful of opulent column dresses felt particularly on point—a couple of those, in seafoam green with bronze dévoré and in lichen green velvet with a sequined bodice and swingy chains, stood out. Fifteen years after founding his label, Esber is having a ball, and it shows.
