This is only Winnie’s eighth collection, but if it looks like the brand has reached a new level of maturity, it’s hardly a coincidence.
Since winning the LVMH Prize’s Karl Lagerfeld Award last year, Idris Balogun turned 30, married, settled into Vicenza with his wife Sira, and lined up production exactly to his liking. As someone who admits to obsessing endlessly over the small stuff, he said that last part was key to a collection that took inspiration from the German word sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent but implies a yearning that is the opposite of nostalgia, he explained.
“What intrigued me was the idea of longing,” he said during a showroom interview. “With nostalgia, you’re longing for something in the past that you can identify, but sehnsucht is a longing for something but you’re not sure what it is.” It’s a familiar feeling, he added, because it returns every time he starts a new collection.
For spring, Balogun revisited some favorite shapes and silhouettes, injecting them with new life through different fabrications, details, or variations on cut. A sartorial take on a classic windbreaker shape, now worked in chalk-striped silk wool, looked strong. So did the Philip trench coat—a brand favorite and the one he wears himself—with stacked welt pockets (the upper ones are designed for keeping the hands warm) and a teardrop pearl fastening at the neck. A tailored overcoat was made of an experiment in rubberized wool, its texture designed to resemble the weave of a decorative mat that Balogun’s grandmother had in her home. He also had that same material spun into an openwork knit sweater that combined the trend for sheer overlayers with a waxy/leathery texture.
The designer also offered up a few ideas about casual formalwear; for example, a tuxedo cut from a light blue satin fabric that, he later learned, was the same material his old boss Tom Ford used in his farewell collection (it appeared here with tailored black shorts). A nod to the season’s Western current came in a silk cowboy shirt with an expressionistic print in soft hues of blue and pink. A few coats offered plenty of crossover appeal; of those, a dusty pink trench in leather, sourced from a tannery the designer had long hoped to work with, stood out.
