Which designer benefitted most from the Great Reset? Almost certainly not who you think.
“All these musical chairs really work for me,” Kevin Germanier quipped backstage before his show. “If houses can’t keep things on the floor, that gives me lots to play with.”
The designer has been exploring this territory for a while, working closely with Alexandre Capelli, the LVMH Group Environmental Deputy Director, to showcase ensembles recrafted from overstock and recycled materials. In September 2024, he presented Prélude—a capsule of upcycled ready-to-wear—at the LVMH HQ on the Avenue Montaigne. Though that presentation got somewhat lost in the shuffle of PFW, it was as promising an argument as any for the concept: most of those outfits could easily have waltzed right out onto the Avenue Montaigne.
For couture, Germanier said he wanted to “take things up a step” with “Les Chardonneuses,” a collection whose title references his Swiss roots through the thistle (“it’s not just the edelweiss,” he cracked) and the idea of untamed beauty.
To open the show, he enlisted his friend Lisa Rinna, who for her couture debut gamely donned a towering black thistle headpiece and a black tulle skirt slung brazenly low on the pelvis, which the designer described as New Look-inspired but “a little bit slutty” (Unfazed, Rinna said she could picture wearing the look for award season—minus the headpiece).
“I think couture sometimes lacks humor,” the designer offered. “But to me the couture client is someone with whom you can go fuckingg crazy.”
Reworked entirely from clothes produced by LVMH houses—as well as uniforms created for the Paris 2024 Olympics—the lineup included a Berluti jacket, reconstructed back to front, its satiny gradient lapel lifted into sinuous plunging back. A men’s washed denim jacket, stripped of distinguishing marks, its logo unpicked, and tags and zips removed, was deconstructed, feminized, and camouflaged with encrustations of crystals and stamen-like embroideries, then cross-pollinated in back with a jumpsuit prototype that never made it into production. Another of many trash-into-treasure flexes: that spiky thistle appliqué on look 2—a dark blue denim ensemble with a Maleficent collar—were sliced-up Coke cans.
These were not creations for shrinking violets, nor were several of them strictly wearable. That goes without saying, but then again it’s also beside the point. What matters is that Germanier is helping to shape a larger conversation about what can be achieved with ample inventory and an unbridled imagination.
