Antonin Tron of Atlein—the label that received a huge and
well-deserved visibility boost this past week when Tron’s collaboration with Kylie Jenner’s Khy line was finally revealed, and all I can say is about time, because Tron and his label are the real deal—is feeling toughness, and he wanted to do outerwear and suiting for the first time. In a nutshell, that’s his cause and effect for spring boiled down to the simplest of terms.
Yet this is Tron we’re speaking about, a designer whose excellent, intelligent, and emotionally nuanced clothes are the result of him really thinking and really feeling—and then really designing. At face value, what we had here were the likes of slope-shouldered mannish jackets that had been gathered with shirring in the waist at the back, worn with wide trousers; waxed-cotton trenches whose hems might trail the floor at any moment, maybe thrown over his impeccably bias-draped dresses; and cargo pants worn with everything from cropped MA1-style flight jackets to crystal-studded draped tops.
Quite a few things here came encrusted with those sparkly little stones. This was a new sense of embellishment from Tron, whose impulse to decorate in the past was to show you all the brilliant ways he can drape. But have no fear, there was still plenty of that here too. Uniting all of this: the tough-as-F combat boots that came with so many of his looks.
Backstage preshow, Tron discussed what had been on his mind as he worked on the spring collection. His mood board was a collage of images of a strident, hectoring Siouxsie Sioux at her best (be still my beating heart; I love her and her music) in full Queen of Punk regalia; Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger; the 2021 documentary Rebel Dykes; and artist Del LaGrace, with Tron referencing their 1991 book, Love Bites, which celebrated lesbian erotica through the lens of a fierce questioning stance on gender roles. (Tron seemed surprised that I knew LaGrace’s work, but then he wasn’t at art school in London in the early ’90s when radical queerness shaped an awful lot of conversation time.)
In many ways, part of Tron’s work has been to interrogate his own role as a male designer creating for women. In the lead-up to designing this collection, he had been, he said, “reading a lot about the history of feminism and feminist writers, and that led me to Rebel Dykes, and it was amazing to see this group of radical lesbians had created this safe space, a club called Chain Reaction”—I remember it well—“fighting homophobia and misogyny. I am a designer for women; I can’t not look at the history of feminism.”
As for how his own gender plays out in his design-as-allyship, Tron mentioned how so many thinkers have presented an idea of gender as performance, and that being something he readily identifies and agrees with. In the same way, he felt it was time to challenge himself. “I wanted to express another side of myself, of my personality,” Tron said. “To show I’m more than a maker of dresses.”
