Few mythical archetypes come with the same sartorial baggage as the witch. (You already know the clichés, so there’s no need to list them here.) But what fascinated Pauline Dujancourt while reading Swiss writer Mona Chollet’s 2022 book, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial last year, was their sense of sisterhood—the fact that many “witches” throughout history were killed essentially for being part of an all-female community.
“There s always this conception about women who live close to other women and who share a special knowledge, a special craft,” the Paris-born, London-based designer said after her show today. “I started looking at these old images of elderly women making lace by hand using wooden bobbins, and it reminded me of me and the team. We don’t outsource a lot—aside from knitters we work with in Peru and France, we don’t really work with factories. We hand make everything, and we’re like a kind of sisterhood, all working next to each other. I started thinking what would ve happened to us, basically, if we’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Dujancourt’s artfully executed runway show gently nodded to classic elements of the witchy aesthetic. First with the crepuscular lighting and eerie dream pop soundtrack. And then with the enormous sculpture of eggshells pinned against the walls, inspired by the late Maria Bartuszová, and the fragments of broken eggshells made from plaster, scattered down the runway, that audibly cracked as models trod on them.
From there, however, Dujancourt took things in a different, more subversive direction. Yes, there were plenty of all-black looks to get the show going—an opulent skirt cut from swirls of pleated silk, a dress with a lace front and knitted bell sleeves, and separates made from a tulle macramé, a particularly ingenious touch of technical wizardry that made what would typically be the chunkiest and heaviest of knits appear feather-light. But by look seven, she began to let the light in, and what followed was a stream of looks in delicate shades of lavender, duck-egg blue, and a light, misty green. “I wanted to pay tribute to these women, who don’t have monuments made in their honor,” she said. “I wanted the colors to bring a bit of beauty and magic to their story.”
Dujancourt’s signature has always been her seriously impressive knitwear prowess—but rather than making it a flex, or something cold and technical, it’s always imbued with a sense of soul and feeling. “I would say that the central point of the brand is ancestral technique,” she said. “I love going back to the way people used to hand-knit, and discovering very complicated stitches that you can only find in books or read with a specific diagram, that you have to understand like sheet music.” It’s a thrill to know that, while the history of knitting stretches back millennia, designers like Dujancourt are still rediscovering the potential of the medium anew.
