Radical Call For Love was the title of Marine Serre’s graduate show back in 2016; it was shaped as a reaction to the terrorist attacks on Paris and Brussels the year before. The recycled t-shirt dress that closed this latest show—her first ever outside of Paris—referenced that starting Serre sentiment. She said: “I think it’s really important to keep that hope, even if it feels like nothing is changing.” The models wearing the 39 looks in this show hailed from 25 different nations in order to epitomize this collection’s title: Sempre Legati (Always Connected).
Eight years on from her emergence Serre remains a radical voice unswervingly committed to her origin ethos. Her vocabulary, however, has expanded. This Pitti show was, in theory, supposed to be her first-ever all menswear presentation: she confessed her excitement about how the new locale had galvanized her to go all-in and add couture and women’s ready-to-wear to the mix. Pitti produced the agonizingly beautiful Villa di Maiano as Serre’s venue. Her models walked the terrace outside while the sun sank over the darkening Tuscan hillside as swallows competed with the drone for airspace in the dappled cloudscape above.
As well as that broadening beyond menswear, her response to this shift in place was to shift her looks beyond the specifically Serre-ish quotidian wardrobe that she has shaped so precisely in Paris. Here an opening black moire silk skirt, abundant in volume, was placed under a chest piece fashioned from vintage jewelry. Much of the menswear revolved around two leading-man tailoring silhouettes, one double-breasted, cinched, and defined, the other single-breasted, boxy, and strong. Scarlet and black were locked in competition within tailored looks punctuated by leather garments for both genders. Serre seemed to be directing herself towards the cinematic as a reaction to her backdrop.
Yet the collection remained very recognizably hers, not least through the cluster of glossily-finished airbrushed leather looks and a meshed bodysuit upon which were gridded her crescent moon motif. Many of the closing credits all-white looks were crafted in upcycled embroidered bed sheets. Her versatile scarf looks this season encompassed trench and liner coats and a trompe l’oeil scarf effect dress. The upcycled scarf menswear shirting whose collars had a wingspan to rival that of the swallows above were more than a little Tony Montana: Scarf-ace. Other looks were crafted from (mostly German) tote bags and tennis bags.
The location, the live band, and this collection all combined to create a fascinating new chapter in the Serre story. Because while her work is very much informed by Paris, it was tangibly enhanced through this fleeting translocation to a dreamy hillside above Florence.
