Having taken a detour to the French Riviera last season, fall finds Pierre Mahéo back in Paris and back to school—in the runway sense, at least, having claimed an entire floor of the École Duperré in the Upper Marais. Show location aside, however, he’s completely disinclined to join in fashion’s current love affair with prep.
“To tell the truth, I decided to go against the flow because following a trend is too simple. It’s just not me,” the designer said backstage before the show. Fans of washed-out pink, yellow, stripes in primary colors, patches, and so forth will be spoiled for choice elsewhere; Mahéo is impervious to all that. “I think it’s important to say a bit hermetic and keep our anchor where it is,” he offered.
If there’s common ground to be found between prep and Mahéo’s particular brand of Left Bank chic, it’s that each scans like a universal shorthand for a genteel, highly specific philosophy of dress. At Officine Générale, this season’s catchword was essentialism, which the designer described as “stepping up your game a little bit.” He hewed to a more refined silhouette in a palette of rich neutrals and treated fabrics as reliable classics, for example, by developing a specific quality of flannel for lightness, fluidity and falling just so.
Highlights in this outing included a good number of covetable coats, ranging from an ecru trench and Prince of Wales check to a couple of shearling numbers, including one that looked like real fur, and glossy chocolate leathers. Men’s jackets were cut straight and slightly larger than in past seasons, while pants were slimmed ever so slightly. For women, trousers largely took their cues from menswear, with wider pleats and a looser cut that sat lower on the waist. Mahéo noted he deliberately stuck to tonal silhouettes in gray, brown, navy, and ecru to amplify a focus on quality materials—“another way of swimming against the tide,” he said. The only sticking point with concentrating on what’s essential, as many are striving to do this season, is that the small screen dilutes subtleties. Officine Générale can be striking in the wild. But, then again, its customer already knows that.
