Before the Carven show began, there was the feeling of a lively weekend open house—only this fifth-floor apartment happened to have one of the most spectacular panoramic views of Paris, spanning the Grand Palais to the Eiffel Tower. Emptied out except for the runway seating and some abundant plants, every room had its timeworn charm: remnants of floral wallpaper, colorful tiling, and other decorative traces that suggested a lush lifestyle more than flat-out decadence.
But whatever traces remain of the family that apparently owned this residence for decades, the space now belongs to Carven and its parent company, ICCF Group (founder of Icicle). While the team is normally spread out across the rooms, lucky them, the real significance is that the building marks the historic origin of the maison, where Madame Carven began designing in 1945. Today, the Carven store on the ground level carries Louise Trotter’s fall collection. Thus, slowly but surely, 6 Rond Point des Champs-Élysées stands not just as the House of Carven but its home.
It’s worth reiterating that Trotter is wonderfully at home here. So much so that she carried the idea straight into the collection, which opened with a luxuriantly minimal dress in a shade of champagne and constructed to hover just slightly away from the body—an altogether different statement than the coat-topped looks at the start of her lineups until now. And it hardly mattered whether the pieces were swaddling or peeling back, sliced open or enhanced with swishing strips, long and unstructured or layered in a loose unraveling of ruffles—there was this constant sense of an intimate world taking shape in unexpected ways. All the shoes, from slippers to puffy mules, set a bedroom mood for introverts and extroverts alike.
And there was space: space to move, of course, but also space to let a pearl necklace drape down the back, or for lace underpinnings to appear discreetly from the back of a waistband. Trotter understands that dressing women means understanding their relationship to their clothes; her silhouettes are considered yet never overworked. The intriguing ambiguity of a rounded trench (coat or dress?) on Marte Mei and the extended white tuxedo shirtdress topped with an ample collarless black jacket on Jessica Miller were both standouts. “A dress is a dress. It’s the woman who wears that dress,” Trotter insisted. “She makes them of her time.”
Wherever the Carven woman is wearing these looks, for Trotter they represent “the quotidian, the rituals.” They have the potential to resonate with an interesting spectrum of clients, and the runway could reflect this more overtly. For as pleasing as it was to see Carven chez Carven, these clothes will make an even stronger impression when they’re out in the world.
