Atlein (Q2193)
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| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Atlein |
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Antonin Tron of Atlein—the label that received a huge andwell-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 inThe Hunger;the 2021 documentaryRebel 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 toRebel 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.”
29 September 2024
Backstage, just before his show at the Palais de Tokyo, Atlein’s Antonin Tron was giving a rundown of what had been in his mind when designing his fall 2024 collection. It worked to dazzling effect and with his usual absolute rigor of economy a lean sinuous look punctuated by zippers snaking over the body, a fur that was actually made out of jersey, and more outerwear than he has ever shown before (and very good it was too). In front of Tron was a board of tightly edited images, a mere 12, which is really not very much at all; I’ve seen designers’ inspiration boards which look like they’ve got the entire contents of the Smithsonian and the Musee d’Orsay slapped up onto them. On Tron’s were pictures ranging from a distant galaxy to a spooky close up of eyes, the pupils just pinpoints of white light, black leather clad glamazons from the ’80s (don’t hold me to that—could have been the late ’70s) and the cover of feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s seminal 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto.“I went back to my obsession, which is science fiction, and powerful women in science fiction,” Tron said. He indicated a screenshot of a dark gray humanoid figure: “This is from a film where an alien life form constantly modifies itself genetically to whatever’s around; I somehow linked that to my own love of using fabric and constantly manipulating and changing it And I’d been reading a lot of Haraway, with the idea of the figure of the cyborg, which resonates given all of the augmented bodies today. She wrote about how we are all augmented. But,” he said, laughing, “I don’t want to get too deep about it all.” In essence, this is Tron’s great strength as a designer: the constant oscillation between the mental and the corporeal; the intellectual and the visceral. He might love a high blown concept, but he is just as much in love with the actual act of cutting, draping and making—the sheer graft of fashion.Tron’s fall was also a reminder that he is perhaps—OK, no perhaps about it: is—one of the most gifted manipulators of material working today. For fall he wanted, he said, to create a silhouette that was “tough and fluid.” You could see it in all the cropped bomber or MA1 flight jacket style pieces, in khaki or red, their unzipped hoods, lined in his faux fur, spread over the shoulders.
They were often worn with tight hooded tops (the look gave a kind of throwback to Gaultier vibe: thumbs up to that) and ethereally light draped skirts, in a golden-green, say, or a deep bordeaux, often with those zips he loved slithering down each side. Tron also used a fabric Cristobal Balenciaga developed back in 1949 called cracknyl—a wool with a waterproof finish that looks like wet asphalt, which along with his matte scale-like sequins in forest green or deep cranberry gave a subtle nod to his sci-fi obsessions with their otherworldly (but still v. chic) appearance. And of course interspersed with all this creativity were some trademark Tron moments: Knockout dresses, twisted and turning around the body, the fabric manipulated to absolute technical virtuoso perfection.
3 March 2024
As a surfer with a creative yen to ride the endless heritage swell of Parisian couture culture—but with a progressive bent—Antonin Tron is carving his own indie spot in this city’s conglomerate-crowded scene. This season Tron said a central inspiration was the performance of Arletty in the 1938 expressionist and borderline existentialist filmHotel du Nord: this contains a particularly wonderful and strangely modern scene in which the actress undresses and dresses while co-star Louis Jouvet, unmoved, plays with his camera. Arletty was also a key reference for Azzedine Alaïa—and here, similarly but differently, the actress sparked Tron’s generation of “atmosphère.”The simple-seeming but expertly applied device of knotting strips of material to secure and drape was a signature that ran through the collection. Tron employed a form-fitting black jersey with lace like relief and chiffon, a material he said was new for him, to create shadows and transparency against the forms he was outfitting: in a season full of sheer sections this stood out for its depth.Tron’s asymmetrical, cut-out and often bias cut dresses in recycled plissé or jersey were as complex in their construction as they seemed to effortlessly sit on the body (with the notable exception of the slightly too-long but expertly-handled of the penultimate look). Cropped vegan leather biker jackets and trenches, cut higher and then knotted at the back, accented the main, softly bodycon offer along with handsome sandals by Christian Louboutin. There were no bags as yet, but Tron said that as he grows his still fledgling business he wants to add them to his mise-en-scène.
1 October 2023
Myth—and the myth of women. That was what Atlein’s Antonin Tron centered his excellent fall 2023 collection on. It mixed to convincing effect in an aquatic palette of blues, greens, lilacs and an ivory the color of breaking waves. There were crushed velvet bombers, sinuous ruched jersey skirts which swished the floor in their wake, molded to perfection pieces in black vegan leather, and one exquisitely worked tulle evening dress which twisted and turned all the way to the ground, a chunky crystal collar glittering away at the neck.From plenty of other designers that statement about myth could come across as deftly crafted but actually utterly hollow. But this is Tron we’re talking about, someone as sensitive to how he ideates Atlein as he is committed to the making of it, which is to say, a lot. He has an exemplary hand when it comes to the manipulation of fabrics, particularly jersey; in an era when design has increasingly become about creative direction, an abstracted, conceptual way of working, Tron is an old school kind of guy, starting with the fabric draped directly onto a dress form, and his technical skills were certainly well to the fore with this collection.The notion of myth came from one of Tron’s deep reading dives, where he alighted on the figure of Gradiva, a mythological female figure from the 20th century writings of Wilhelm Jensen, and inspired by a Roman relief, (and mythologized further after being lauded by Freud). Before long, he was also looking at other ancient statues and reliefs from around the world. And that got him to his second thought: How fashion mythologizes who it’s actually making clothes for, a fantasy of why they might want them, and how they might wear them.Of late Tron has been focused on parlaying his craft into creating things which will make a real and meaningful connection with the women wearing them. A deepening of the intimate and empathetic way he thinks about designing for their bodies, especially given that increasingly women are (rightly) considering the only gaze that matters is the one reflected back at them when they look in the mirror. That approach has only taken on more importance for Tron as his label increasingly draws high profile figures to it.
And judging by the sight of the fantastic singer and fashion plate Aya Nakamura arriving to take her seat at today’s show, looking sensational in Atlein tulle cut to hug every curve—not to mention commanding attention in the room—plenty more of them will be following suit.
5 March 2023
When Sigourney Weaver dispatched the terrifying H.R. Giger-designed Xenomorph into the jaws of hell in Alien, she did more than let the movie’s audience finally exhale again. As Ellen Ripley, Weaver created a heroine for the ages, one who has become revered by designers—including Atlein’s Antonin Tron. “I first saw Alien when I was 14,” Tron said a few days before his show.“The shock of her, and her performance… It’s a sexy movie, in a way, because she’s so sweaty and physical. When she’s hiding, trying to get into the spacesuit, she’s sexy, but it’s a sexiness that’s for herself, and of herself.”You might get some visual clues to Tron’s inspiration from looking at his accomplished spring collection: his ruched drawstring effect similar to the pulls on Ripley’s fatigues; the wet, slicked skin and hair of the models akin to her appearance as she waged her one-woman war against a big old homicidal creature. Yet it wasn’t the real takeaway here. Ever since he launched Atlein, Tron has made a point of using his impressive draping and cutting skills with jersey, his favored fabric, to create clothes which empower a woman; he might be a guy, but there is absolutely no room for male gaze objectification here.So that ruching, which gathered this way and that, emphasized his athletic silhouette. It might run down the sleeves of a second skin tailored jacket, or slither down the sides of a hip-cleaving skirt in crushed velvet, a new fabric for him. More ruching worked its way diagonally across dresses which looked like they could be slipped on as easily as a T-shirt, while others had been worked with a ruffled effect (also new for Tron) that was anything but fussy or frilly. There were scuba-like leggings with tiny cut-outs at the waistband, with one-shouldered tops, and plenty of columnar or softly draped dresses with open backs, as if Tron had just taken a length of fabric and magicked it around the body, the ease of the pieces belying the kind of technical skill needed to create them. (Let me tell you something you likely already guessed: That’s a lot of skill.)Tron has been quietly working away, honing and perfecting his idea of Atlein for a while now, but this collection felt like a bit of a breakthrough moment; greater fluency in his articulation of technique, ever more commitment to sustainability (many of his fabrics were yet again upcycled or recycled) and eschewing anything extraneous in pursuit of clothes which felt strong, and real, and adult.
This season’s shows marked the rather strange crossroads fashion is at: looks lighting up like fireworks on social media, and disappearing as quickly; powerful, inescapable brand statements played out on a global scale. What’s an indie designer versed in the art of making meant to do? For his part, Tron is clear. “With this collection, I’ve made peace with myself, as to who I am as a designer,” he said. “I’m focused like I’ve never been before.”
2 October 2022
Antonin Tron originally thought to hold this show in his own studio, but Lucien Pagès, his PR, counseled against it:trop compliqué. Instead, we sat on the stairs in a Palais de Tokyo basement space in which were clustered the mannequins the designer imported from his studio. That hinted at the simple-sounding and ingeniously achieved conceit of this collection, which was to make it entirely with materials that were already present in Tron’s workspace. While many of these materials were conventional enough fabrics given a zhoosh of fresh treatment for the season, a few were hilariously surprising. The top and dress made from a grid of connected spent Nespresso pods made you concerned for Tron’s heart rate and wonder at his dexterity. Other unorthodox materials included used kiteboarding sails he’d collected from his surf buds and hoarded in order to give them this new life. “I’m a mad draper,” Tron said backstage. “I manipulate fabrics all the time, put them on dummies…this was a draping frenzy.”There were patched-together worn-out band and activism T-shirts (including one printed with the Extinction Rebellion logo); vegan leather; a jersey coated with something indigo to create a leather-y, denim-y sheen; and an overdyed past-collection deadstock snake print. From this, Tron fashioned pieces that were sexy and old-world glamorous in their sumptuously draped obeisance to the bodies they contained. In a show that featured a closing look that paid homage to both Madame Grès and a masked-model approach to Martin Margiela, Tron convincingly combined his passions for the métier of the first and philosophy of the second: The result was a collection that was beautiful and, if “moral” is not quite the right word, then decidedly anti-decadent. Sexy, sustainable—with not a hint of greenwash—and highly caffeinated too, this was all good.
6 March 2022
Chaosanddisorder: Two words that you’d hardly associate with Antonin Tron or his label, Atlein. This, after all, is a designer who takes nano-millimeter precision with his cutting and draping, resulting in a look that beautifully works the tension that can arise between control and release. Yet here we are with his excellent spring 2022 collection. There’s an exhilarating sense of Tron abandoning himself to new impulses; a loosening up, both literally and figuratively.How else does one explain the likes of a pin-sharp jacket tailored in an upcycled wool-mohair, its sleeves casually scissored off, the threads left to fray and trail? Or the hallucinogenic tees—the swirling patterns the result, Tron says, of working with “a tie-dye master from Germany, a rave-y guy, who I found online”—that might pop from beneath zip-up corset-like belts made out of old wetsuits. There are more of his elegant, exquisite lingerie tops, their draping inspired by a vintage Vionnet dress—Tron’s draping amplified by the French lace it’s edged with. These are worn with tough, riveted carpenter jeans cut from vegan leather, or a narrow skirt whose strictness is unraveled by the panel which trails off to the side, like a sensual, deep sigh.At a preview for these collection images, which were photographed at the Collection de Minéraux de Sorbonne Université, Tron readily agreed with the idea that things had taken a disorderly turn in the Atlein universe—though really he feels like he is just tapping into the prevailing reality of where we are right now. “I think it just feels like this idea of a directional collection or show…it is not how the world is anymore,” he said. “This collection could be broken down into so many stories…and that’s how women are dressing now. I am bringing a bit more chaos into Atlein, because all the rules have collapsed.” That’s been the prevailing story of the season, and the commonality between the best collections, Tron’s included: The designers who’ve turned their back on the old ways, the accepted truths, the received wisdom—all of them acknowledging that the center isn’t holding anymore. That’s what’s powering their creativity.Yet there’s also something more personal about this latest from Tron: A deeper dive into his own past.
Before studying fashion in Antwerp, he read literature at the Sorbonne, and that’s when he discovered the university’s impressive collection of minerals, whose glorious, hypnotic, hard-to-believe-they’re-from-the-earth hues inspired spring’s color palette. He felt an immediate connection to the place because of his grandfather, who instilled in him at a very early age a love of nature and the natural world.That love informs so much of what Tron does today—and what he stands for. Despite finding fertile ground in acknowledging—drawing on, even—an unraveling system, one thing has remained constant: His commitment to being as sustainable as he can. At one point during that preview, a sinuous floral dress appeared, dark shaded areas cutting the delicacy of the blooms. Turned out it was something he had already shown during a previous season, except with one crucial difference: The dress had been entirely floral. He decided to repurpose it by bleaching it, then dyeing it black. It looked terrific. And it underscored that when—like Tron—you have method, you can also relish the madness.
4 October 2021
Well, here we are then. We’re back, I guess. Runway shows! (Thank you for the major, major New York Public Library moment, Mr. Jacobs.) Street style! (What can tell you? I am still shuffling about in an ancient pair of Gap jeans.) More IG posts about fashion happenings and parties than you can point an iPhone 12 Pro Max at! (No pangs of envy about those, yet, or more likely, ever, but check in with me again after Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga IRL haute couture debut.) But still: For all of the Business as Usual signs being put back in place, does that messaging really live up to the reality? Plus: For all of us who’ve worked through this past year-plus, we’ve had a lot of time to really think about why we’re in the industry they call fashion.Funnily enough, that was the question put to Antonin Tron, the thoughtful, contemplative and, oh yes, very talented designer behind the French label Atlein. He knows exactly why he’s in it. “I have no choice, I can’t do anything else,” Tron replied, with a rueful laugh. “This is what I do. I love making clothes. I love cutting. I love making shapes.” We were on a Zoom—where else?—to chat about Tron’s resort, 26 sublime looks which nurse no greater ambition than to be absolutely terrific things to wear, created with precision, care, and emotion; a celebration of craft and technique imbued with a pragmatic approach to get dressed every day.You could romanticize Tron’s story of quiet and refined clothes-making to the ends of the earth: He grapples with constructing his work with as few seams and as much thought as possible. And maybe we should; maybe when we talk about storytelling in fashion, responsible design is the one tale that needs to be getting told a little more often and a little more loudly these days.Much of what you see here was made out of supplies of fabrics that Tron already had to hand, and then used to refine pieces and silhouettes he’d previously explored. Look one, for instance, a slip dress with an artful knot, made out of a shimmery gold satin (first used in his spring 2020 collection), worn over a black tank made out of eco Seaqual yarn, and terrific black pants of the sort not seen since the days of the much missed Helmut Lang. (Those pants are a recurring favorite here, adding to the streamlined layering look Tron’s got going on).
Also for your consideration: The cocooning drape dress, which looked like the love child of Mme Grès and Mme Vionnet, with falls of fabric which can slide off to reveal the shoulders, long in blue, short in red. Or a terrific camel skirt, with a bias panel which bisects it to give a graphic look—and a distinctly sensual attitude. A black vegan leather (from fall 2019) shirt to throw over everything; a surf rash guard (Tron is a serious surfer) to layer under everything. Black sequins cut, sliced, and reversed for dresses and skirts and sparkling with a sporty, casual ease which diffuses the glamour. And the standout (for this reviewer, at least): Tron’s coppery satin tank dress, bound at the edges with scuba-like seaming, as low-key as it is luminescent. In other words: Perfection, in the most real and relevant of ways. And in other words: a reminder of exactly why one might get into (and stay) in fashion.
2 July 2021
The last time Antonin Tron showed his label Atlein was during the fall 2020 collections in Paris. One year on, Tron has had a chance to step back, take stock, spend time off to quietly sketch and drape (and surf; he’s a serious and committed surfer) in his beloved Île de Ré, the seaside community on France’s Atlantic coast. “Since then, it has felt like the whole universe has changed five times,” Tron says. “It was good to have that break, to get rid of things I didn’t want to have anymore.”Now he’s back with a new collection which takes his impeccable way of manipulating jersey into a whole new direction, reenergized and recharged, with a clear and direct sense of purpose, showcased in a short movie made by his brothers, Benjamin and Virgile, who work in film and 3D design. On a new schedule too, of sorts, presenting during the haute couture, even if it’s really more couture adjacent—Tron’s not on the official calendar, just pragmatically aligning himself to it to improve the time lapse between the sales and production of the collection.That’s the thing with Tron; as much as he knows his way around a killer drape on a dress, he’s as emotionally and culturally attuned to practical considerations, which really manifests itself with this fall collection. Some of the changes he’s made are immediately evident, some not. The latter first. Tron’s finally been able to use as many sustainably sound fabrications as he’d like (well, almost). Much of what’s here is made from Seaqual, a postconsumer-waste yarn which he has magicked up (after about a year’s development) into a crepe jersey. Recycled polyester also features heavily, some with a technical quality to it, other times as a plissé material which laps the silhouette like the calmest of seas.“Finally, I can make the Atlein draped dresses in 100% recycled fabrics,” Tron says. And there are quite a few in this collection, imbued with that slither and slide effect he does so well, sometimes asymmetric, sometimes edged with a guipure-type lace. (He’s hoping to find a sustainable tulle to mimic the effect for the dresses which go into production.) Others are constructed from gleaming planes of fabric, carefully cut so they look like they just effortlessly fall across the body.
25 January 2021
At face value, you could read Antonin Tron’s fall 2020 Atlein show as an assured and sharp-as-a-tack homage to the 1990s, a decade that’s been at the forefront of fashion’s consciousness for some time now, and most often with designers of Tron’s generation. It has definitely been a reference point for quite a few this season, as a more pared-down, stripped-back, and harder gloss and attitude have been permeating the work of designers all the way from New York through Europe to here in Paris.Consider the evidence in Tron’s case. There was a definite glam-slam toughness to his (mostly) black minimalist tailoring: the killer curvaceous jacket in leather and quilted nylon which opened the show, say, or precision-perfect lean pants breaking floor-wards over she-means-business pointy pumps with a substantial cross-vamp strap. The same trousers, in leather, were worn with a black sleeveless tank that positively called out to be worn by some latter-day Kirsten Owen or Stella Tennant. Elsewhere, Tron, who wields scissors to jersey with an inordinate amount of flair, cut a silken black fabric into liquid—and witchy—bias-cut dresses and the slipperiest of skirts.To further remind you of the era of Courtney and Kate, lace (the first time he had ever used the fabric) was worked into lingerie-inspired pieces—a gorgeous drape-front slip dress—or trimmed a few of the looks he conjured out of a snakeskin print, where reptilian scales slithered into a mineral stone motif or edged the bra tops which winked out from beneath his jackets. It was all extremely covetable and considered—grown-up cool, or coolly grown up (you choose)—and conveyed with a tightly focused urgency. And the show underscored that he is one of Paris’s best-kept...well, if not exactly secrets, certainly unsung young heroes.But to merely see his work through the prism of the ’90s does it a huge disservice. Tron is a thoughtful and sensitive designer, one deeply committed to systemic overhaul to make positive change. Should you have read the profile of him in last November’sVogue,you’ll know he’s an active member of Extinction Rebellion, and that black-line makeup on some of the models’ faces was a nod to an algorithm developed by Russian Grigory Bakunov to outfox facial recognition technology.The fire and ire of Tron’s passion for what needs to be done is there in his designs, and not just the fact that the leather wasn’t actually the real thing but a vegan version.
He has also been able to raise his use of upcycled fabrics to 50% of the collection; pre-show, he made the point that he works with whatever he can find, preferring to see it as a creative challenge rather than an aesthetic no can do.That’s why it wasn’t really ’90s grunge-izens who hung over the proceedings, but a cast of creators and activists who aren’t nostalgically looking back at the last decade of the 20th century. Instead they are agitating for change in today’s challenging and, yes damn it, frightening world: environmentalist Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived in a tree for two years to fight deforestation, or artist Tomás Saraceno, whose work could be seen in the video that played at the show, highlighting his imaginative exploration of air travel which operates with heat and wind and not fuel.The latter feels particularly appropriate right now, and not just because of our awareness of our carbon footprint; the growing fear over a coronavirus pandemic has added a palpable shiver of fear to worldwide air travel and to our global nervous system. But Tron would be the first to say there’s no point in hiding your head in the sand. Taking action, being fearless—That's is everything to him, just as it should be to the rest of us.
27 February 2020
On October 7, Extinction Rebellion will once again be active in Paris, and those taking part in the protest will include the Atlein designer Antonin Tron, who has quietly been a member of the environmental protest group since the end of last year. I say “quietly” because he’s been loath to say too much about his involvement for fear of being labeled an eco-designer, or for Atlein to be dubbed a sustainable brand, though in some ways both are true; for Spring 2020—a collection of gorgeous, grown-up, and chic (yay, bringing chic back!) clothes—Tron was able to use 60 percent deadstock fabrics that he’d sourced from mills and factories across Italy. (And in another right-minded effort, he designed a tee bearing the image of a white-cheeked gibbon; 20 percent of the sales will go to fund Extinction Rebellion.)Still, Tron has a point: It’s amazing (and, okay, not wholly surprising) how quickly the green tag has become a marketing tool to engage the Insta-generation, a corporatized initiative to somehow speak to fashion’s place in the very real and frightening future we are heading into. While some of the biggest global behemoths have been engaging with how they can play their part, mindful of both the environmental challenges and cultural shifts we are going through, the reality is all too apparent: How does anyone in fashion square away their participation in the industry, an industry built on the perpetual thrill of the new, at the very moment when consuming more, more, more is the very last thing any of us should be doing?It’s something Tron has been trying to reconcile ever since he was moved to sign up with Extinction Rebellion; reconciling his creative impulses with his own unwavering commitment to real action on climate change. And he has arrived at a kind of militant peace (if you can call it that) with himself, where he can bring together being someone who makes clothes of value that are designed to last and last, and someone who isn’t prepared to eschew his political stance. “The answer, I realized, isn’t in the big things,” Tron said backstage just before his show, “but in the small.”For “small,” read: “concise” (he’d whittled down the show to 31 looks), “local” (he has chosen to make most of his clothes in his native France, with technicians and craftspeople who’ve been making things the same way for years), and “personal.
” Ever since he launched Atlein, in 2016, it’s obvious he has been intimately engaged with the draping, cutting, and manipulating of (usually) jersey, which is a very him fabric; it yields to the body of its wearer with ease, but it needs a lot of dedicated and delicate handling of the technical challenges it presents to get it there. Tron is a thoughtful designer, a problem solver in pursuit of beauty. Any one of the terrific sinuous black dresses that he showed more than ably demonstrated his ability to work with the fall and flow of the material, highlighted perhaps by bias-cut panels of a pastoral floral print, or planes of fabric folded over and embellished with a row of gold snaps. They were so good, it’s hard to think of those as small, so ambitious and perfect were they in their execution.
26 September 2019
Backstage at the Fall 2019 Atlein show, it became apparent that all was not as it seemed. How about that molded and draped black leather, impeccably worked into a swaggering biker jacket atop a spangled emerald green jersey skirt, or a killer dress, the material deliciously caressing its way around the body? Ah, wrong. The “leather” is actually, designer Antonin Tron explained, a coated jersey he has worked on, created by “an indigo induction,” as he called it, “a bit like a denim treatment.” The muted florals that gleamed from short sequin jersey dresses? Well, nearly right. It’s actually a print that blends camouflage, an animal pattern of indistinct origin, and yes, blooms. But perhaps the biggest—certainly the most unexpected—reveal of all: Tron is a goth. Who knew?The collection, its staging, and the very starting point of thinking about what he wanted to say this coming Fall came from going to a Bauhaus gig at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in November last year; his love of the group only superseded by his fandom for the Sisters of Mercy, another shadowy intense band. “I know I don’t look like it,” Tron said, grinning, the very picture of a clean-cut, athletic man, “but my heart is black velvet.” And right on cue, there was indeed a gorgeous and considered use of this soft and pliable fabric, particularly in an abbreviated dress, its light-soaking qualities creating the subtlest ripples on the body. However, truth be told, the one quibble with going so Bauhausian with the presentation’s moody lighting was that it didn’t always make it easy to appreciate his very good work. But then, peering through the gloom has been the story of Paris, as much as big shoulders and stomping ankle boots.Ultimately, though, Tron’s Atlein is about seeing what you get. Since he started a few years back, he has pushed himself to explore and experiment with the jersey that defines the label. (No wonder then that heroines like Madame Grès and Jean Muir were his aesthetic mentors when he was thinking about this collection particularly, and Atlein generally.) And if Tron likes his music loud, then there’s a quietness to what he does that should be appreciated in an era when fashion’s volume has been turned up to a disconcerting, ear-splitting level. “There’s a lot of pressure because of that,” he said, “but my idea of radical is not to go overboard; I want to keep the focus on what we do and how we make it.
” By which he means working with small French factories or using deadstock fabrics, a sustainability practice he has been committed to ever since he launched Atlein, and which he has never discussed before. Perhaps he should, to appreciate the better what he does, because while Tron may love goth, he also knows plenty about soul.
28 February 2019
Six seasons in and one very well-deserved ANDAM Prize later, Atlein’s Antonin Tron has taken stock of where he’s been—and where he’s at. Apologies for the use of a phrase that’s a throwback to the head-trip hippie 1970s, but it’s kind of appropriate here; like many designers, Tron is both engaging with the reality of working as a young independent designer in an industry that’s being put through the ringer right now, and also his own mental and emotional wanderlust, that desire to be someplace else where you can breathe and think a little bit easier and deeper. In Tron’s case, it might have been the trip he made this past summer to Indonesia to surf (he’s serious about his commitment to getting on his board), but for Spring, he was thinking about the utopian idylls depicted in the work of French animator René Laloux, specifically his 1973 movieFantastic Planet.Articulating a wide-eyed wonder for the world, for the beauty and fragility of nature—not to mention the West Coast festival-going lifestyle that celebrates it—has become a recurring theme for Spring. And it was an interesting—and ultimately fruitful—line of thinking for Tron to take, because for all the dreaminess, he allied it to his deep-rooted pragmatism. He can live in his head all he likes, but there’s an absolute corporeality to his clothes, something strongly evident in this terrific collection. This time around, it was in the form of his sharp yet youthful takes on the omnipresent pantsuit, worked here as short buckle-waisted bombers and utility jackets, both worn with lean yet fluid trousers, all in a vibrant deep red or homespun blue or pink florals, which had a naive charm to them.Elsewhere, Tron recalibrated where he first started—a sure hand with sinuously draped fabric—with bicolored dresses or fluttery layerings of athletic tanks under short bias slips, ethereal and grounded at the same time. Occasionally, some of his models would carry tiny bags with long, skinny straps. You could easily mistake them for bikinis—as if these young women had just shaken the water off of themselves and then gotten dressed. It was an alluring image: the suggestion of a wonderful life elsewhere, but still very much present in the here and now.
27 September 2018
Quite recently, I was chatting with a renowned and sharply observant fashion stylist; she mentioned something that she’d been thinking about the industry for a while. “Sometimes,” she said, “you don’t always know who the designers are actually designing for.” You could be forgiven for thinking that, in our hyper-speed-moving, nanosecond-trend-overload moment, the “who” has almost become an afterthought; as long as strong, pervasive images keep a-coming, then someone will inevitably want what’s on offer. That wasn’t the thought that crossed the mind at Antonin Tron’s accomplished Atlein outing held atop the Institut du Monde Arabe one snowy Paris morning, his third show and fifth collection for his label. It was refreshing to see a talented and relatively young designer—he’s in his early 30s—be so clearly preoccupied with the “who”: real women with real lives who might actually want real clothes. And rather cool ones, too. He riffed on where he started, a sensual slip-sliding of jersey around the body, then fused it with his more recent preoccupation with utilitarian tailored forms.Backstage, Tron explained the use of the words ofThe New Yorkerwriter William Finnegan fromBarbarian Dayson his invitation, an evocation of the exhilarating physicality of surfing, which Tron knows all about. (He’s an inveterate rider of the waves, from France to Scotland—and beyond.) Tron called it his most personal collection yet, and you could see why. For all the intricacy of the clothes—a terrific navy belted coat that opened the show, flying open to reveal wide pants as if moving with the wind, or the plaid jersey placed on the bias and ruched, the print recalling the kind of cozy shirts he’d wear after being in the chilly water in the early morning—it was also reductive in its own way. Clothes shouldn’t forget their physicality when worn; they should work. And work they did, be it one of the variations on a shirt turned into a coat or jacket, perhaps layered under a hooded gilet; a sporty zipper-necked cable-knit sweater atop a slim jersey skirt with a hem that fell into points; or any one of his body-hugging columnar dresses, the necklines elegantly pulled askew. In all, it added up to a collection that sought to be more than inspiration or image; it sought to be meaningful. When the conversation turns again to who’s actually thinking about whom they’re dressing, you just know whose name is going to come up.
1 March 2018
At a preview the day before his show, Antonin Tron, the talented designer behind the label Atlein, mused on the inspiration for his Spring 2018 collection: the power of memory, its place in his life—and our lives—and the way it can power the imagination. That’s pretty heady stuff, no pun intended. Yet, it’s also an apt reminder that this young Frenchman’s creation of corporeal fashion—he’s marked himself thus far as highly gifted at shaping and molding jersey around the body—comes from a cerebral place, the sensuality of his clothes spun from a sensitive intelligence. The memories that formed Spring 2018 ranged from his grandfather, whom Tron was close to, and who died when the designer was relatively young; to the sense of identity, both personal and national; and on to the yearnings of his postadolescent years, which took him to exploring the freedom of club culture. Freedom then, and freedom now, perhaps, since this season Tron was also intent on transcending the tag of being the “jersey designer,” of which more later.Still, it might not be that fruitful here to try to spin any of those memories to specific moments in the collection, though the excellent veiled jersey polo shirts and crisp topstitched navy trousers offered a link to the incessant beat of after-dark havens. The show did, however, offer a moment of collective fashion memory, via the casting of model Georgina Grenville, iconized as one of Tom Ford’s earliest Gucci girls, and looking terrific here in a look that’s quickly gathering pace as key for next year: the intricate top—Tron’s twisted and turned colorful fil coupe with bands of jersey—and lean, lean, lean pants.It was the opening that revealed something of Tron’s ambitions for Atlein. Eschewing the manipulation of one of fashion’s most tricky fabrics to work with (jersey) until later in the show, Tron tried his hand at tailoring, using a sandy-beige cotton drill for curvaceous field jackets, some with a deftly rendered off-kilter quality to them, with asymmetrical tabs and button fastenings, as well as skinny Bermuda shorts, and yet more of those narrow trousers, these with a cool utility vibe to them. Like much else of what was on offer here, they worked—and were an apt reminder that if you want to have some new memories to treasure, then you’ve got to take some risks. Even better when they pay off.
28 September 2017
Given we don’t have that much of it these days, how about some good news for a change? But first, the backstory: Young French designer decides to start his own label while still working the day job (operating out of his walk-up apartment) and shakes the dice of fortune to see where they land. The designer is Antonin Tron, his label is Atlein—a virtual primer in the myriad ways you can cut, drape, and construct jersey. That act of striking out on his own was in early 2016. What a difference a year can make. Tron won an ANDAM First Collections Prize last July; retailers like Neiman Marcus and Ikram snapped him up; and now he’s in competition for the 2017 LVMH Prize.Oh, and the dice have been shaken again, because Tron decided to show on the runway for the first time. For a designer who has a razor focus on the scalpel-sharp techniques of how to work with one of fashion’s most notoriously tricky fabrics (and pretty much works solely with it), putting on a show is a gamble, particularly when one’s label’s raison d’être is technique and is virtually denuded of any flashy styling tricks or gimmicks to give you a little catwalk frisson. And when you’re dealing with jersey, there’s no place to hide—whether you’re a designer or, let’s be entirely frank, the woman wearing it. So luckily for Tron, his gamble worked beautifully. Rather than have the eye distracted by stunt casting or a veneer of hipness layered on by a stylist, he did what he always does: He showcased his exemplary skills in manipulating jersey to a dazzling grown-up effect. There were plenty of the bias-draped dresses that he has done from the very beginning, now worked with an almost sari-like drape that bisected the upper body and exposed a contrast ribbed top, or worked with inset panels of silk jersey into a fluid, tweedy material that was—yep, you guessed it—more jersey.In fact, save for the great body-contouring viscose patched knits (best as a black square-neck sweater worn with lean ribbed pants), everything here was done in the material that begins withj. (Guys, seriously, how many more times can I type the word in this review? C’mon.) It was fused and then tailored into strict-shoulder jackets that stayed close to the body, finishing at the coming Fall season’s new preferred length—a three-quarter point that hits the mid-thigh—or rendered as a floral, almost flock-effect jacquard for asymmetric hemmed skirts and dresses that contrived to be one part romantic and one part athletic.
If there’s any quibble, it’s that Tron could have upped the color a little more, as he played mostly with black or sober tones. But the pleasure to be had from a designer simply and quietly showing what he can do well? It’s a win all the way.
2 March 2017
A lot has changed for Antonin Tron since the much buzzed-about debut ofAtleinlastMarch. His brand has been picked up by stores like Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, The Line, Net-a-Porter, and The Webster. In July, he won ANDAM’s First Collections prize, a well-earned windfall that allowed him to effectively double his output to 33 looks. What hasn’t changed: He’s still showing his collection inside his own well-appointed apartment (with his brother managing the door downstairs), and he still relies on that same supplier of jersey for his hand-draped designs. What else? Those designs are still very, very good.The ANDAM money has been well spent. For his sophomore collection, Tron didn’t disappoint. He infused his gracefully fluid silhouettes with color (robin’s-egg blue alongside earthier tones like a sage green and a reddish clay). Using a sturdier jersey he developed with his factory, he unveiled the rarest of treasures: truly good trousers (his were sharp, pin-tucked, and high-waisted). Office-ready sheath dresses had their figure-flattering seams picked out in graphic topstitching. A long, liquid black evening gown had a strappy back and a slinky, wet-feeling weight due to the jersey viscose piqué (another fabric made uniquely for the brand). “There’s nothing to constrict or to stop the movement of the body,” said Tron. “To me that’s the most important thing.”Most pieces were made of different weights of jersey alluringly seamed together in alternately sheer and opaque panels. This was a nod, Tron explained, to the sculptures of John Chamberlain. “I like how Chamberlain just presses two things together,” he said, producing a book of the artist’s work from a shelf in his foyer and opening it to an earmarked page of car crash sculptures. The designer had also employed a team of jewelry makers in the Marais to create sturdy, hand-sculpted enamel pieces inspired by the Le Vaucour lava-glazed pottery that he’s amassed over the years and through repeated trawls of eBay.Tron’s designs strike a balance between the structured and the soft that is essentially and innately female: the elegant minimalist pleasure of a gown that feels like a T-shirt; the single, strategic drape that changes a silhouette from simple to spectacular. It’s a thrill to watch develop, not least when one considers what’s ahead for the young designer. Accolades, of course, but then a strategically nurtured business: Knits, he hopes, and then slowly, carefully, more.
“I’m dying to do coats,” said Tron. “I love tailoring. But we’re going to grow slowly. I want to take time.” We’ll just have to wait.
27 September 2016