The black leather, the trailing tartan hems, the bad-girl black lace tights, the sprinkles of jet beading and jinglejangle of charms on oversized safety pin brooches, the buckle-backed vintage-y vests, and the pinstriped tailoring that looked like you’d taken it and then said, ‘f–k it, I can make this look cool’—the whole she’s-come-undone vibe: That should have been the first clue. For fall, Isabel Marant creative director Kim Bekker’s head was somewhere between Siouxsie Sioux singing “Love in a Void” circa 1979 and Nicole Kidman taking a younger lover in the 2024 movie Babygirl via Grace Jones walking, walking in the rain.
And in that cultural and temporal span you get the perfect image of women empowering themselves to say hell, no, and do whatever they damn well like. A colleague has spent the last few days talking about how this current run of shows in Paris has been about higher female power, and nothing is more Isabel Marant than that. It’s what she built her brand on—oh, as well as those sexy, effortless, knockout clothes.
At a preview a couple of days before the show, something else was effortless, as in effortlessly gracious: The way Marant generously acknowledged that this collection was so much about Bekker’s vision—something underscored by how Marant stepped away to let Bekker take the bow at the show’s close. And as to the clothes themselves, the starting place, said Bekker, was about how she’d been thinking about presenting a strong woman through tailoring: the wide shoulders and the whittled waist, but contrasted with layers so things felt grungily punkish. “We wanted a bit of a clash,” Bekker said. “The fishnets, the floral lace, the plaid, and the different scale of the pinstripes.”
Bekker isn’t the only female designer who has plundered tailoring to make her point this season—the point being celebration of uncompromising feminine strength—but her way was true to Marant: the swaggering coats over a jumble of striped shirting, sequins, sheer lingerie dressing, and vertiginous strapped ankle boots, or the way the jackets could be cinched by adjusting the buttons, and then basically matching the length of them to whatever they were worn over. “Everything,” Bekker said, laughing, perfectly capturing the spirit of Marant in yet another way, “is also super leggy.”
