“With all this talk about quiet luxury, we’ve forgotten what dressing up feels like,” said Co’s Stephanie Danan on Zoom from a lively Paris street corner. With every other designer pivoting to what she called “wardrobing,” Danan said that this season she was going against the concept. “We wanted this to be like a coup de coeur, which in French is like an emotional buy. This is about attitude and great clothes.” Her look-book images drive home the emotional part, with her cast of three models of different ages (one of them the actor Élodie Bouchez). “They’re all women who are confident and style things in this very ‘I own my shit’ kind of way.”
Among the pieces in the collection that feel like an absolute necessity to this writer, who also owns her shit, are an enormous trench coat with linebacker shoulders and a pinstripe skirt suit—both with extra asymmetrical panels that give the appearance of two pieces layered atop each other—as well as a red leather A-line skirt worn over a matching stretch-wool pencil skirt and a bodysuit with a built-in scarf. The built-in scarf is one of Co’s signature motifs this season; it also appeared on a gorgeous double-face cashmere coat, an opulent fil coupé dress, and a simple bodysuit that was styled with the collection’s most perfectly unhinged piece: a pair of baggy sweatpants with a layered basketball-style wide short in what Danan called a “parachute kind of fabric.”
“We loved the idea of mixing sportswear with more conservative pieces that felt very fancy,” Danan added. “There’s no clear through line here. It’s a sportswear pant with a bodysuit with a fringed scarf attached to it—like, what’s going on here? This woman’s very free.”
