Closing out Études’s Paris triptych, Crépuscule—or “Twilight”—lured guests to an open-air runway atop a disaffected parking lot, where they emerged from the last ramp into a 360° view of the French capital’s celebrated rooftops.
That the setting was in the scruffier reaches of the 18th arrondissement and included a live performance by DJ and techno music producer The Hacker made a precise point: These clothes are about real urban dressing, not the version of Paris found in over-glossed postcard clichés.
The Études trio—Jérémy Egry, Aurélien Arbet, and José Lamali—ended their “meta-exploration” with a cross-pollination of soft tailoring, utilitarian functionality, and the comfort of worn-in favorites with a lashing of techno and skater references.
“The idea is about discovering this part of Paris—its energy, sensations, textures, and adrenaline—on your own. There’s a tension between arriving in places you wouldn’t normally see and how one might evolve as they move through the city,” Egry offered. These kinds of places, Arbet noted, tend to be more accessible toward the end of the day, “when the night opens up all sorts of possibilities.”
For that reason, the color palette scanned like a metaphor for nighttime adventure, moving from shades of Parisian zinc through pigeon blue to fiery orange and, finally, the bright white of dawn. Outerwear looked particularly strong, from trenches and bombers revisited with gathered sleeves to the season’s essential cargo vest. Multi-pocket nylon trousers paired with oversized jackets or double-breasted coats made a convincing proposition.
Here and there, the clothes were embellished with manga figures evoking gargoyles and Gothic architecture. A carte blanche collaboration with the young Paris-based artist Julian Farade took to the rooftops through bird, chimney, and butterfly motifs and a colorful riot of abstracted shapes on a denim jacket or baggy trousers. Compellingly, the spiked ironwork found on bourgeois Haussmannian façades—a feature originally designed to prevent illicit lovers and others from intruding—was reprised in tattoo-like motifs and thorny jewelry that hinted at danger and forbidden temptations. Boots and mules from a first collaboration with the famed Parisian boot maker La Botte Gardiane looked solid too.
