“I want to break free-yee!” Chitose Abe’s audience jolted to laughing attention as Freddie Mercury’s lyric suddenly boomed through the system in Le Carreau du Temple. The models walked through rubble-edged breaches apparently punched through a wall that bisected the runway space. Later we saw a T-shirt with one of Thomas Hoepker’s fist-in-lens portraits of Mohammed Ali, on the back of which was printed one of his rhetorical roundhouses: “What you’re thinking is what you’re becoming.”
What Abe wants to stay free of, she clarified backstage, is a commercial imperative to prioritize orthodoxy and convention over innovation and difference. She said, via translator, “When we’re creating the clothes there’s some expectation that clothes needs to be this way: that we have to create something that is sellable. But I wanted to be free from that.”
While it’s admirable that Abe is staying vigilant to that danger, this collection, for all its Sacai disruption, landed with an unmistakably commercial punch. Everyone I spoke to afterwards wanted it.
The prime convention Abe was breaking with was the binary norm—up and down—of worn silhouette. The show ran episodically through various genre-chapters: monochrome tailoring, leather and shearling outerwear, fringed tweed (disappointingly menswear free), knits, checks, workwear and tailoring in ochre khaki. There was also some delicious washed and indigo denim, aran-accented padded outerwear, ditsy floral thistle-prints and knit, workwear with triangle motif quilt patterning, tailoring-aviators, and denim as eveningwear. A trio of rive gauche inflected womenswear evening looks featured skirts cut from triangular quilted sections.
The triangles that recurred throughout the collection (without being too heavily laid on) reflected the three-faced nature of the silhouette Abe was consistently pitching. This saw the shoulder-to-waist and knee-to-ankle zones divided by a new insertion she punched into place there. Whether through kilting, skirting, jacket bolstering, buttress-like billows pockets or other tailored (not layered) extensions, she added a distinct equator to the typical north and south geography of the silhouette.
That was not the only three-way playing out this morning: The denim sections were a Sacai collaboration with Levi’s that included notch lapel and utility pocketed versions of proprietary canonical jacket types. The patterned workwear was a collaboration with A.P.C. whose prints were drawn from the quilts of Jessica Ogden. There was another seasonal collaboration with J.M. Weston, the luxe Limoges heritage shoemaker.
Michel Gaubert’s excellent soundtrack was as stimulatingly mixed as Abe’s collection. It played out with some Tears for Fears: “All for freedom and for pleasure. Nothing ever lasts forever. Everybody wants to rule the world.” As fashion’s entrenched power structures endure a wobble, might the independence and freedom of Abe and her ilk catalyze into a mainstream value underpinning commercial desire? If Ali’s maxim applies, then why not?
