Paris Notes - Day 1
From Auralee to Conkers and CSiLLAG
It’s day 1 of Paris Fashion Week. Or it is for me, at any rate. I’ll be live-reporting on IG — and trying to do daily wrap-ups on the go here.
Auralee kicked things off on Tuesday. Last year it was still possible to write that Ryota Iwai was having a moment — and to be surprised by the fact that, despite the brand’s modest size, it stood its ground next to luxury powerhouses and designer veterans. It’s a bit different this year. With both a global fanbase and media presence now firmly established, Auralee is no longer the stuff of dreams. It’s what fashion’s reality is made of — in its colors, its layering, and even in its criterion of absolute wearability (or, as critics call it, boring dullness).
That’s true in a pretty real sense. As Peter Han — former menswear designer at Margaret Howell — said in last week’s feature, soms icons have recently passed away (Armani, Valentino, etc.), and others are gradually retiring (Van Nooten, etc.). It means we’re right in the middle of a generational shift. Auralee is unusual in this context, though what’s unusual today may well be tomorrow’s usual. There’s the small handful of younger designers who honed their craft and are now circulating between the big houses, of course. Iwai, by contrast, rose to prominence with his own independent brand, after a decade of under-the-radar, ‘underrated’ status, and without celebrity endorsement or the scaffolding of a legacy house.
It makes you wonder whether — no, even feel that — Auralee is paving the way for small, process-first designers to start from scratch and eventually go big. (To some degree, Our Legacy did that too — save for the occasional dip in fabric quality, and save for the LVMH investment.) I mean, there’s a lot of talk about Auralee entering the global scene, but very little about how it’s been breaking from it, let alone how others might move through the resulting cracks.
Look at me go, though — predicting the future of fashion. What do I know! Or, phrased as a question, which seems more grammatically correct anyhow: What do I know?
I know I arrived in Paris around noon today, and then walked from Gare du Nord to my apartment on Rue Faubourg du Temple. There, I met up with photographer Sven Minnis, and together we walked the twenty minutes to my first appointment: New York-based CSiLLAG (pronounced: Chill-äh-g, which translates to star in Hungarian).
Cole Star started his label back in 2015, when he made six colors of moleskin fatigue pants for a then newly opened Noah store on Mulberry St, New York. Shortly after, he started a seven-year tenure at Martin Greenfield — the legendary Brooklyn master-tailor who crafted suits for everyone from Eisenhower and Obama to Sinatra and DiCaprio. Around that same time, he was introduced to Emily Bode, working closely with her on her first few collections.
With CSiLLAG, he’s going all-in on informal tailoring and low-key luxury. The collection — presented in an antique dealer/collector’s home — is as small as it’s deeply considered: three or four pairs of trousers, about five shirts, and two tops. That’s not much, but then again it is. The fabrics are incredible, and every single piece makes you feel posh in the only right sense of that word: owning the ground you’re standing on. My favorite was a pair of blue/purple-ish wide-leg trousers, which Cole calls the ‘work pants’, made from linen and cotton. I took a picture, but it was completely blurry — my bad.
Next up: Thurston. I covered Fielding Miller’s foray into performance headwear here. His showroom — “not nice from a design standpoint,” his words, not mine — was pretty humble, but served its purpose well. That’s exactly what his product does, too. It’s grounded in the everyday life of friends and folks that, as Fielding calls it, “go out a bunch” — meaning: who go out skiing as much as possible. There are a couple of new silhouettes in new fabrics, including the High Loft wool Fielding mentioned in our chat. It’s all solid, and the fits are good.
Next, I met up with Peter Sherno to visit Maison Douillet. Clément and his brother Germaine have turned their atelier — part of a two-year residency they’re doing in Paris — into a make-do studio. Like Thurston, and like Conkers (below), Maison Douillet’s clothes breathe the air of the place they come from. In this case, that’s the French Alps, and more specifically, the daily reality of living in a French mountain town.
On that basis, they’re doing something no one else in doing, literally. I don’t even know how to call it. Luxury outdoor gear? High-end Alpine attire? Whatever it is, the different pieces — about 20 in total — have this amazing comforting appeal to them. That’s partly the material: a lot of silk, and varieties of wool (loden, yak, etc.). It’s also the design: extremely welcoming, with just the right amount of weirdness (a loose thread here, a raw edge there).
Maison Douillet also presented the mountain boot they made in collaboration with French heritage shoemaker Heschung. We’ll be hearing more about that soon I’m sure.
Peter and I jumped on the subway, heading to north-east Paris to meet Oliver Warner and Romina Ferrari from London-based Conkers. Their AW26 collection is called ‘local’, vernacular for your favorite pub around the corner. It also captures much of what’s essential to what Conkers does: local sourcing in London and other parts of England, building relationships with their community, and having tea or a beer with the people they’re working with. “It’s my dream to open a pub one day,” Oliver told me. He should, and I’m sure it would become many people’s local.
From that feeling of the reality of ordinary human life, Conkers is creating some pretty spectacular clothes to live it in. There’s some jewelry (a category they’ll be expanding anytime soon), accessories (scarfs and gloves), and about twenty-five items in total, from dry waxed cotton workman suits to hundred percent linen farmer shirts.
Last stop of day 1: the launch of Fray Papers, in an incredible cramped space, which meant that most of the folks were standing outside in the rain in front of a barber who was desperately trying to keep his entrance clear. I met the Camiel Fortgens team, talking about their furniture-inspired AW26 collection (more on that in the day 3 report) and a big thing happening this Sunday.
I’m typing this at the end of day 2, which was even more packed than day 1. Like last time, it’s the moment I realized a daily Paris report is completely undoable. But, as they say — or the Parisians in 1968 at any rate — demand the impossible. And that’s just what I’ll do.
You could add Rier to the « high end alpine wear. »