Marine Serre: From Radical to Pragmatist

PARIS — As of late’s announcement that Marine Serre will likely be Pitti Uomo’s nearest visitor dressmaker, is a few more or less particular manner for the French dressmaker to inform the arena about her pristine males’s assortment. Males have at all times performed a component in her presentations — she’d even taken to appearing her collections at the males’s calendar — however it used to be best two months in the past that she introduced a completely free menswear area. And now this, already.

“Pitti is one of the magical places to make a first menswear show,” Serre marvels. “They contacted me, simple as that.” However it might be that she is in her personal magical playground, the place excellent issues simply accumulation going down. Gross sales have been up 20 % in 2023. She introduced her first “retail experience” at Galeries Lafayettes in December. And on manage of her blooming trade, model’s erstwhile Crown Princess of Dystopia has additionally switched conceptual gears.

Before, there was, Serre sounded the alarm in regards to the while in provocative presentations like Autumn/Wintry weather 2009′s superior “Radiation,” which conjured post-apocalyptic worlds from the detritus of this one. (I believe she’d favor to name it “upcycling.”) This segment crescendo-ed with “Amor Fati,” the movie she exempt all through the pandemic. However she adopted that with “CORE,” a set, movie and conserve which celebrated the society, the humanity on the middle (the core) of her logo. And at her girls’s display a past in the past, she talked in regards to the procedure through which her dystopic outlook used to be changed with an on a regular basis more or less utopianism.

Previous this past, Serre confirmed in a society range transformed from an used railway bank in Paris. The target audience used to be ringed by way of a café, a bar, a florist, a pizzeria, any such concessions that handover locals. She sought after a communal revel in, and there used to be a captivating sense of side road year to the complaints. 3000 family spoke back her Instagram name for fashions. “My duty now is to bring 10 minutes of joy,” she mentioned earlier than the display.

In hindsight, she recognizes that it would possibly not were her absolute best assortment, however it made family glad, and she or he’d like to maintain that temper at Pitti. She visited Florence for the primary week to scout places and located someplace with an implausible view and an all-important reference to nature. Past that, she’s no longer about to damage the amaze.

The Paris display marked Serre’s go back to the ladies’s calendar. She felt the journey used to be important. “It’s super-important for me as a woman to design for women.” Girls dominate her logo, each with regards to the staff (six of her 8 board participants and 65 % of her workers are feminine) and the route of the corporate.

So menswear is a escape. The sunny parting of the 2 collections displays Serre’s personal conviction that they get dressed very otherwise. “I like women who assume their femininity and I like men who assume the fact they are men. As a designer, I know you can’t really design the same way… so much depends on the shape of your body. For this reason, I need to separate both the collections because it does not always work aesthetically.”

“I don’t think I understand men more than women for sure,” Serre continues, “but I am someone who is really happy to get feedback. When I designed with A$AP Rocky, I never had problems designing for men with another guy telling me what they like or don’t like.” She’s a excellent listener. “They tell me they need something simpler, or they want a wider leg, or broad shoulders to feel stronger. It’s the same thing I’m doing with women. I like things that are quite elegant and flowy, with grace, even if it’s a tracksuit. You get the vibe in the volume.”

There’s at all times one guy she has in thoughts. He used to be in her head when she selected the venue for her girls’s display, since the reclaimed range used to be known as “Ground Control.” She pictured Him strolling via Berlin within the assortment’s trenchcoat, tie on the waist. “It is a simple jacquard trench in cotton, but, depending on the colour of your hair or the way you walk, that trench is going to talk about something else,” she explains. “It’s the idea of the daily utopia. Everything can be magical.”

“He” is, in fact, David Bowie, the human embodiment of Serre’s personal logo of alchemy: “Making the garment a pretext to tell a story, to make the imagination work. David was really that. You never knew what was next with him. When I think about his films, his videos, his last album, it was all so connected. He thought about everything. Of course, I have other men who inspire me, but I like to leave it at him.”

It’s been 8 years since Serre introduced her logo as an idealistic extra to the craze business’s damaging have an effect on in the world. She’s best 32, however a mature pragmatism has taken over. “The challenge is not greater, it’s just different,” she says. “I think I’m a bit in my own bubble anyway. Producing differently, being fully independent, I don’t need to make all my choices based on money. I have a freedom that is really powerful to me.”

On the similar week, Serre accepts she’s now a part of the business she at first located herself in opposition to, and her function is now not to tone the alarm, “because everyone knows, and they don’t want to know.” At the moment, she says she thinks extra about what to do along with her society, the family who percentage her values.

A pledge Serre comes again to regularly is “connection.” She as soon as advised me that what scares her maximum is the theory of a human being distant, unwanted. Sooner than her endmost display, she imagined the entire thing hinging on a unmarried query: Should you needed to name any person to inform them one thing you’ve by no means dared to mention, what would it not be?

“I like to connect people with each other, and to connect with someone you have to tell the truth about yourself.” I couldn’t let her advance with out asking her what her resolution can be. “I love you,” she mentioned. Now why wasn’t I remotely stunned by way of her answer?