Ann Demeulemeester (Q2658)
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Ann Demeulemeester is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Ann Demeulemeester |
Ann Demeulemeester is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
On Saturday night, the Ann Demeulemeester show took place in a hulled-out modern building flanking the Montparnasse train station. One day it will become offices and a school. But for now it offers up a large, rough-hewn space with a very long runway, lined on this occasion with a trail of white lilies. It was pretty, if a tad funereal. On every seat was an envelope with a moody “Wall of Reference” printed in black and white. It name-checked Hunter S. Thompson, medieval poet François Villon, Dennis Hopper, Jack Kerouac, and Stevie Nicks, among others. Nicks’s handwritten lyrics for “Rhiannon” appeared on the last page. There was a musical introduction by way of a live performance on electric guitar. That was pretty long too.What was clear is that creative director Stefano Gallici, now three seasons into his role, is feeling more at home. During a preview, the designer explained that he came to fashion through music, namely punk, indie, and garage. At the time, he played in a band (My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr. were favorites), and his mother was a major Fleetwood Mac fan. While he chose to dive back into his teenage obsessions, this collection wasn’t just about his own experience, he said. The brand—part mindscape, part autobiography—has attracted a younger community that’s highly engaged and constantly evolving.“It was unexpected, even to me, but this young tribe feels seen [by us],” he said. “We touch the kids who don’t recognize themselves in the contemporary music field, and they want to express what they stand for in fashion and art. What I want to bring them is not just a series of shows and collections, but also a musical and cultural landscape.”Gallici doesn’t particularly relish the termmuse,but it’s fair to say that Nicks, notably in herBella Donnaperiod, struck the dominant chord for spring. Models and musicians—Shane Hawkins among them—emerged in moody looks leavened by powder pink, lilac, mauve, and very pretty pieces in chiffon lasered into English eyelet. There was a lashing of New Romanticism, flou floral silks, and hammered satins, paired variously with distressed, patched, and embroidered denim, hand-distressed jersey, and pants cut on the bias. Gallici said he was using the rawness of lace on bare skin, feathery knits, deconstructed and inside-out tailoring, and slouch to conjure a feeling of absent-mindedness—or what he called the “endless possibilities of lost and found.
”Whatever that means, Gallici arguably conjured all the hits in a way that should prove commercial. It’s the kind of music the Ann Demeulemeester crowd knows when they hear it. They were out in force on Saturday, all dressed up and ready to follow wherever the night may lead. They took the lilies with them.
29 September 2024
Given the kind of idolatry Ann Demeulemeester inspires, creative director Stefano Gallici said he felt, with this sophomore show, like he was once again embarking on a new beginning.“Ann has been so many things. I wanted to approach the archives like a mind-scape,” he said during a preview, listing among his primary inspirations the founder’s constructivist period and an emphasis on shapes, volumes, and materials. “For me, there is this metaphoric way of interpreting my surroundings, like carving a path through the forest,” he mused. “There’s always a boundary to surpass.”Though he takes his cues from house archetypes, the designer said he is gradually stepping back a bit from the archives (“but in a smooth way”) to incorporate some of his own signatures. While waistcoats, tailored trousers, a three-piece suit, and a certain slouchy ease remained central to the plot, there were new twists like a leather Perfecto, more structured outerwear, and a taste for leather and lace—in one instance embroidered with thorns—that skewed very Stevie Nicks.On the runway, however, the emotion seemed amiss, as if the brand’s usual melancholic romance and a sense of yearning had been replaced by something palpably more angry, more angsty, less achy. That may have been a styling issue: Taken piece by piece, the designer ticked off many of the season’s trends—handsome burgundy leathers paired with blush silk and satin, a panel wrap trimmed in shearling, shaggy coats, DIY-inflected macramé tops, a leather apron dress, overcoats trimmed with fur, and a darkly romantic overcoat in crushed black velvet. Many pieces looked perfectly nice; none looked new.Which brings us back to that forest metaphor. As Gallici himself noted, “Sometimes when you get lost, you have to find a new way.” It seems clear he’s still mid-process: Deciding to put himself out there is the next boundary he’ll have to surpass.
3 March 2024
Starting your show more than an hour late is not the greatest way to make a first impression. Stefano Gallici, who was promoted from menswear designer to creative director at Ann Demeulemeester when Ludovic de Saint Sernin exited after just six months, wasn’t served by the distant venue or the near total darkness in which we waited either.Having joined the brand in 2020, the 20-something Gallici does have a decent handle on Demeulemeester signatures like androgynous tailoring and white shirts and leather bibs and harnesses. The royal blue of a stretchy sheer dress looked like it was inspired by the same color in an iconic spring 1998 Demeulemeester show. Kirsten Owen, who appeared in the lineup tonight, walked that runway 25 years ago. But things were weighed down here by multipocketed pants and overskirts and the ribbons that trailed off many of the looks and dragged on the runway—all 100 meters of it. Demeulemeester was a most poetical designer, but she also stood for a kind of rigor.Preshow, Gallici posted a handwritten note to his Instagram account that closed with a kind of mantra: “Awareness and respect, rather than deference and orthodoxy.” That sounds fair enough. Tastes have changed since Demeulemeester was making her definitive 1990s collections, and brands have become too comfortable with unfiltered reissues. What this sweeping collection lacked was its own sense of definitiveness. That may come with more time.
30 September 2023
Ludovic de Saint Sernin’s Ann Demeulemeester debut was bookended by identical looks, the first in black and the last in white. They featured a feather bandeau sculpted from leather—feathers being a treasured Demeulemeester motif—and a bias-cut maxi skirt whose hems swirled around the model’s feet as she stalked down the runway in knee-high stiletto boots. “It’s my way of saying that after this first step I’ll be spreading my wings and then be able to express myself,” he said of the double-up.For season one, though, De Saint Sernin set out to pay tribute to the designer whose house he inherited. He said he poured over Rizzoli’s 2014 book of Demeulemeester’s collections, and requested 80-some looks from the house archives to personally try on. Familiarizing himself with her output was the right instinct. De Saint Sernin has carved a niche for himself with sex-positive crystal chainmail tanks and leather micro shorts for all genders, but Demeulemeester’s fans are fiercely loyal, and not likely to be easily won over by the new kid on the block—especially perhaps if that new kid isn’t a woman.It’s worth noting, though, that de Saint Sernin has the house founder’s blessing. Demeulemeester is friends with the label’s new owner Claudio Antonioli, and she and de Saint Sernin met up when he got the gig. “She gave me the best advice, which was ‘work hard and do the best you can do.’”The best of what we saw on tonight's runway were the men’s suits, worn in signature Demeulemeester style with undone white button-downs, their cuffs extending a few inches past the jackets. Also strong: the marvels that are those bias-cut silk skirts. Most were in silk and paired with shearling shrugs and capelets, but de Saint Sernin cut one in chiffon, so all of the tucks and darts that allow them to drape the way they do would be apparent. In place of shirts, the models’ arms were crossed over their bare breasts, “almost like dove,” he said.It was a tender gesture, but he could have pushed himself further. What does his version of Demeulemeester’s tank top look like? And what about tailored jackets and coats? It’s a fall season, remember. And given that de Saint Sernin is such a big proponent of fluidity, the female models could’ve used a low-heeled boot like the men wore—and vice versa. That said, his Demeulemeester debut proves de Saint Sernin has range. The curious and the committed will be back next season to see which way he spreads his wings.
4 March 2023
Cher’s arrival at the dispossessed parking garage turned event venue for the Ann Demeulemeester show was a happening all its own. A ripple of applause ran through the cavernous industrial space, and even front-row editors rose from their seats to snap a picture. The brouhaha was even bigger after the show.What happened in between was a restrained study of light and dark (mostly dark), from a studio that counts Martin Margiela alums among its number. The tailoring was masterful: oversized jackets with dropped lapels paired with ample, flowing trousers; long-sleeve, fitted crewneck tops serving as an understated foil for fishtail skirts. Staccato-succinct show notes specified that white cotton shirts—“the absolute icon of the brand”—had “unfolded in other expressions and attitudes,” which meant that some had grown into fitted, floor-length dresses, and others were caught, as if flash frozen, beneath a whisper-thin layer of fine knit in front, their backs cinched by a thin strap or two. The same mantra returned again and again in black or white with subtle plays on texture. The glossy black leather slip dresses with yawning backs looked commercial enough, but the poetry was AWOL.For decades now, the Ann Demeulemeester base has been hooked on a very specific register of weeping willow chic. Despite the occasional tendril floating from a buttonhole, back, or belt—or, inexplicably, rings—that aesthetic seems to have been diluted with the company’s relocation, under new stewardship by Claudio Antonioli, from Antwerp to Milan. Either the studio was playing it safe in uncertain times—in which case they had good company this season—or this outing was some sort of sartorial palate cleanser, a play for time, a prelude to renewed relevancy. Since one of spring’s biggest buzzwords has beenoptimism, let’s just hope for the latter.
2 October 2022
Held over from January’s Pitti courtesy of Omicron, tonight’s third collection but first live presentation of the rebooted Ann Demeulemeester was shown in the Réfectoire des Cordeliers. This moody Gothic remnant—once one of Paris’s most-used show spaces—was Demeulemeester’s venue of choice before she exited the label back in 2013: She returned to its mournful walls this evening to see how brand savior Claudio Antonioli’s design team is interpreting her source code.The Réfectoire has been unromantically renovated recently—its new wooden floor looks like that of an ostensibly upscale airport coffee shop—and thus the space’s authentic 700-year-old gloom has been tangibly suppressed. This collection, too, looked like a careful renovation that focused on the surface without considering enough the atmosphere. “Good fashion is like rock music: all anarchy and revolt,” is a line ascribed to Demeulemeester. This evening, however, there was no anarchy, no revolt.It looked like the team had studied the archives, identified some recurring motifs, and then gone all-in on repeating them ad nauseam. What that gave us was long-skirted oversized jackets in boiled wool, slim-fitted deep V-neck dresses, trenches, and then garments that combined or layered the three. The two signature elements were the strapping—of course—and the high-cut single vent at the back of the garments, whose height depended on modesty and what the garments were: Outerwear venting went to the vertebrae; dresses were vented to the buttock. The colors started in black then gradually expanded into blackish navy and blackish aubergine. The models all looked like they were heading to a meeting with their bank managers to declare themselves bankrupt, but romantically so.Designers with the rigidly individual signature of Demeulemeester or her close aesthetic cousin Yamamoto don’t change in order to keep abreast with the tastes of time. Instead, the tastes of time constantly change and just occasionally coincide with theirs: It’s that “even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day” factor. Yet now, when Demeulemeester’s intellectual-depressive-poetic aesthetic makes sense again, the team should be ready to declare it with more fervor.
5 March 2022
It’s a new day at Ann Demeulemeester. Creative director Sébastien Meunier exited his post last year, and the brand came under new ownership not long after. Its buyer was Claudio Antonioli, a cofounder of the New Guards Group, who helped shepherd Off-White, County of Milan, and Ambush to global success. Antonioli has plans to return the Antwerp-based label to its darkly romantic glory. “For me, it’s really love,” he told my Vogue Runway colleague Laird Borrelli-Persson last season. “Ann is one of the most important designers in my life, and I think in the fashion system. It’s really authentic; I don’t want to change the brand.”Antonioli hasn’t reinstalled Ann as a design lead; a “ghost team” is responsible, but she’s part of the equation. The brand’s Antwerp flagship reopened this summer after a renovation by her husband, Patrick Robyn, and her handwriting is all over the new collection. The words that appear on several pieces and across some models’ faces in slanting, all-lowercase letters are recognizably her own.Before his departure, Meunier had drifted from the core Demeulemeester aesthetic, leaning boho or glam as the seasons went by. This reset closely borrows from Ann’sspring 1998collection, the one that’s remembered for the “holy” tank tops the models wore and that the designer gave away to all her guests, and a blazer with a torso-crossing strap closure, which became a favorite of Ann’s friend and muse, Patti Smith. It’s apparently in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.That 24-year-old collection ranged far and wide compared to this one, which came in a strict palette of black and white, zeroed in almost only on denim and leather, and depended heavily on styling details like bowler hats and leather strapping. But despite all that, it was the right archival show to start with: It’s seared into the memory of those of us who are old enough to recall the ’90s as the peak of Belgian cool. And for those too young to have been there, it’s a clean slate of minimal tailoring, with plenty of 2020s slouch upon which they can build.
3 October 2021
The spell has been broken: Sweatpants are not forever. Love and Ann Demeulemeester have saved the day with soft, poetic tailoring.Powering this resurgence is Claudio Antonioli, the Italian retailer, businessman, and cofounder of New Guards Group, the company behind Off-White, Palm Angels, and other high-profile streetwear brands. He acquired Ann Demeulemeester last year, primarily for reasons of the heart. “For me, it’s really love,” said Antonioli on a video call. “Ann is one of the most important designers in my life, and I think in the fashion system. It’s really authentic; I don’t want to change the brand.”To that end, he’s in constant communication with the house founder and has hired her husband, Patrick Robyn, to work on the remodeling of the flagship in Antwerp, Belgium. Antonioli corralled photographer Willy Vanderperre and stylist Olivier Rizzo to produce the moody and romantic collection film; the collection was designed by a “ghost team.”Some of the fall pieces are remakes of things Ann Demeulemeester created decades ago, and much of the collection iterates on her distinctive, androgynous, and, as Antonioli notes, logo-less work.One of the Antwerp Six, Demeulemeester was a proponent of Belgian deconstructivism in the 1990s. Her take on the trend was extremely gentle and based on expert pattern making. Those ribbons that run diagonally and protectively across the body inside a jacket allow it to slouch off the shoulder. The Demeulemeester signature, as can be seen in this collection, istailoring.Tailoring that is sophisticated and sensual, comfortable and comforting, and has a morning-after sexiness to it.There’s an essentiality to the Demeulemeester vision, a wardrobe of several easy pieces: shirt, jacket, skirt, pants, tank, vest, and coat. These are all imbued with a gothic romance akin to that of the designer’s muse, Patti Smith, who is channeled in the film and look book for the new collection.The buzz around this relaunch isn’t about ’90s nostalgia: It speaks to the endurance and integrity of good design, and the power of an unwavering, individual vision. A list of designers with identities as absolute as Demeulemeester’s would be short, suggests Antonioli. He finds modernity in the androgyny of the designer’s vision, and has concrete proof, as a retailer who has worked with the brand since the late 1980s, that good design is timeless design.Going forward we can expect to see the Demeulemeester DNA closely followed.
With a brand as singular as this, says Antonioli, “really, the only approach is that one. If I would like to make a commercial brand, I wouldn’t buy [an existing brand]; I would start with a new one.” The way he sees it: “I work for Ann Demeulemeester, not they work for me.” And that, folks, isamore.
9 March 2021
Following the thread of ourIn Vogue: The 1990s podcast,we are closing out the year and heading into the new one with a series of newly digitized archival shows from the decade that fashion can’t—and won’t—let go of. Ann Demeulemeester’s spring 1998 ready-to-wear collection was presented in October 1997 in Paris.Ann Demeulemeester, one to two female members of the Antwerp Six and a designer acclaimed for introducing deconstruction to fashion, retired in 2013, but rarely a day goes by that I don’t think about her work. The ways in which Demeulemeester built fluidity and nonchalance into clothes using ingenious cuts and poetic drapery have always moved me.Demeulemeester didn’t follow trends or use elaborate sets; instead she told stories and evoked deep emotions through materials and construction. Her process was as instinctual as it was innovative. She was her own fit model and her focus was always on “real” clothes, but ones that were nonetheless imbued with magic.The designer’s spring 1998 “Corps Humain” (Human Body) collection seems particularly resonant in this COVID-ravaged year, when each cough and every ache feels like a warning signal. We are hyper-aware of our bodies, our physicality, and our fragility. Demeulemeester, who recently started making pottery, has spent isolation with her husband Patrick Robyn in the Dutch countryside. She graciously agreed to share the story of “Corps Humain,” one of her favorite collections, with us. Read about it below.“The start was that I was thinking about Dadaism, the Dadaism of somebody like Marcel Duchamp, one of my favorite artists. I was a bit in that mood, [and then] I discovered a poem of Allen Ginsberg called “Footnote to Howl”—that is one thing. The second thing is that Patti Smith had a new record out and with exactly that poem she made a song.It was really this kind of magic moment when I heard it; it was really like a magic spell. This poem talks about everything—really everything—that is holy. I was already working with my Dadaistic idea of the body, and then to have all of a sudden this word and everything attached to it, I just had to work with that. [Ginsberg] says this also: “the body is holy, you are holy, the arm is holy.”
26 December 2020
Next fall will bring to a close, at least for now, Sébastien Meunier’s experimental odes to the performing arts. As a send-off he chose to pay tribute to Robert Wilson’s oeuvre, specifically “The Unicorn,” a fresh spin on the story of Mary Stuart, aka Mary Queen of Scots, aka Bloody Mary (played onstage in Paris last year by Isabelle Huppert, to Meunier’s lasting fascination).Fashion is currently having a love affair with mystical bodies and creatures, so why not a unicorn? Meunier was wearing a silver unicorn horn, made by his studio, as a pendant on the day of the show. Backstage, he touched on the animal’s untamable nature and how that might connect with feminine strength, mystery, rebelliousness, and, ultimately, fashion.Borrowing from Wilson’s staging, a likeness of Mary appeared in the background at the show’s opening. From there, the designer explored minimalist lines in rich brocades and velvets, forsaking the diaphanous layers of seasons past in favor of literal structuring, with wire bent, retainer-like, over bodices, panniers extending from the hips, and some cool sets of shoulder cuffs and feathered headgear. A sleeveless gold brocade number struck the right balance between regal and edgy, and the Demeulemeester base will probably thrill to the slithery one-shouldered number in red velvet, slung with the ease of a T-shirt over a square-neck stretch top. To close, the designer threw in a few dresses done in stretch leotard fabric that, he joked, could almost have been catsuits had they not flared into skirts.In his tenure at Demeulemeester, Meunier has mastered the codes and also made them his own—no mean feat. The minimalistic shapes on today’s runway were a welcome break from the weeping willow melancholia offered up in seasons past, although the satiny, shirred numbers looked somewhat tricky. Meunier salutes a strong woman, for sure. But this reviewer was left wondering wistfully whether, one of these days, Meunier might get more comfortable with investing womenswear with the kind of raw, sensual emotion that has made his recent men’s outings so compelling.
28 February 2020
Over the past few seasons, Sebastien Meunier has romanced his menswear to beguiling effect.For Fall, he continued in that vein, sending out all manner of clothes inspired by the groundbreaking, erotic Afternoon of a Faun, a dance choreographed and performed by Vaslav Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes over a century ago.“I’ve always been fascinated by dance and particularly that ballet, it’s so romantic and goes so well with the house’s ethos,” Meunier said backstage. To that end, he reproduced the piebald Nijinsky wore onstage, and when the models weren't sporting easy, drawstring or razor-cut trousers, they wore leotard-like knits beneath their coats, the better to keep attention on theatrical, tailored outerwear accentuated by the metallic creep of ivy jewelry—lots of it. (These weren’t just showpieces: they will be produced, the designer said).Highlights included narrow, double-breasted jackets with strong shoulders and the occasional leather accent, sometimes paired with trousers cut large to replicate the triangular line of a faun’s leg. Mesh-like knits with chunky patches and distressed details played foil to covetable coats, such as an ecru one with metallic sleeves, velvet with a mother-of-pearl cast or else printed for a feathery effect, and plush numbers in shearling or fur. One glossy leather coat brought to mind the glazed finish of crème brulée.Meunier sent a few “priestesses” through the hills and vales inside the Espace Niemeyer, too. But he seems more at home with menswear. He gives himself more latitude, questions traditional notions of masculinity, has fun, goes with the flow. The Ann Demeulemeester woman might be tempted to jealousy. She needn’t be. She can just go ahead and borrow.
18 January 2020
What do Ann Demeulemeester and Dolly Parton have in common? It sounds like a setup. But Sébastien Meunier showed that there’s more to mine in that association than anyone would ever have guessed. Surprisingly, it actually stood up.A few months back, Meunier caught the American singer Lingua Ignota—née Kristin Hayter—in concert in Antwerp. The designer described her cover of the Parton classic “Jolene” as a kind of a bolt from the blue: He knew he had the music baseline for his Spring collection. “This womanisJolene,” the designer said backstage, referring to the song’s lyrics about a femme fatale. For her part, Ignota canceled a concert to attend the show.Demeulemeester fans will follow the brand to the ends of the earth. This season, that meant a hulled-out civil engineering building on the southernmost hem of Paris with, a spokesman whispered, seven underground levels for nuclear data storage.The many who made the trek were rewarded with an unexpected take on Demeulemeester’s signature aesthetic, one that Meunier described as more in his own image—slicker, sleeker, grittier, and certainly glossier than the wispy, wistful romance of recent women’s collections. Not that the Spring collection was without nostalgia: The mostly black and white lineup blended punk with references to the years Meunier spent cutting his teeth at Jean Colonna and Maison Martin Margiela in the ’90s, spliced with signatures from Demeulemeester’s own heyday. To wit: a re-edition, 25 years on, of her classic cut-out, “bird claw” boots, their curved heels newly elongated to 10 centimeters thanks to tech borrowed from the automobile industry.That footwear was the foil for what Meunier described as “almost animal” cuts that curved high on the thigh, with layers of cut-out panels buttoned, perforated, or intermittently stitched together to highlight the body in movement. Razor-cut vinyl bandeaux, with or without a train; coats as glossy as an oil slick, and fishnet or lace camisoles layered with tank dresses added up to a look Meunier described as “enigmatic and more dangerous.” “Trench coats and shirts open up in surprising places,” the show notes specified, laying out a studied counterpoint to the romance of Meunier’s much-praised men’s collection for Spring. It will be interesting to see how that all plays out in stores.
27 September 2019
Let others roam the desert. Sébastien Meunier’s home base in Antwerp puts him in an ideal position to look to the sea. “I wanted to speak about the port at Antwerp, the dockers, the sailors, the fisherman, but with a certain angle,” he said, nodding to Belgian sailors and, particularly, the sexual tension in Fassbinder’s 1982 filmQuerelle.William Shakespeare, too, was in evidence, with spoken excerpts and T-shirts referencing the tempest of the soul.Although the sailor shirts may have had some wondering whether the designer was going to go literal, the collection proved a masterful exercise in sensuality. Meunier took a well-worn trope and spliced it neatly together with Demeulemeester’s DNA to make it recognizably his. The result was a lineup of covetable and very wearable pieces—and not just for men—in black, white, and navy, with shots of mauve, mustard, red, and sky blue.Highlights included several shirts and a double trench. The majority of items could be worn as is or—and this was the designer’s real coup—unbuttoned here and there for a more deconstructed look. Many have tried that tack in recent memory, but few as successfully. As is his wont, Meunier played games with references to works by artist Marcel Broodthaers and snuck in punch lines wherever he could. “It’s like dress and undress,” he said.
24 June 2019
Backstage before the Ann Demeulemeester show, designer Sébastien Meunier said his inspiration wasmontres sacrésfrom a very specific place and time.“In the 1970s, in Antwerp, there was a rebel youth movement, but I was looking at the art scene,” he said. Specifically: the Wide White Space Gallery, which became home to artists including Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Beuys, James Lee Byars, and many others. Byars, in particular, staged his performances in Antwerp and became very linked to the city that also brought Ann Demeulemeester to the fore. Today, Byars’s works can be seen in front of the label’s stores.Byars’s “Giant” installations—huge bands of fabric rolled out all over the city—and his favorite colors became the starting point for a Demeulemeester collection that looked lighter than usual, in white, red, pink, violet, and anise green. “It’s almost psychedelic, in a way,” Meunier allowed, as he reached for qualifiers. Finally, he settled on “mystico-Seventies.” In that vein, there were a number of loose maxi dresses designed with transformability in mind: Those can be hitched up, tightened, draped, or shortened as the wearer sees fit.Elsewhere, the house’s weeping willow aesthetic came through in layers of spider-web knits, transparent overlayers, pooling hoodies, fluid brocades, and feathered and fringed harnesses. Demeulemeester fans will gravitate toward the fluffy feather jackets over liquid satins; a layered tuxedo jacket with a brocade lapel and a black coat with a moonlight lining also looked sharp.Those tall hats, too, are a Byars signature. “Byars was always looking for perfection, beauty, and a certain truth,” said Meunier, adding that an obsession with perfection was something the artist and the house’s founding designer shared. Perfection does not belong to this world, of course, but meanwhile, Meunier offered his clients what they need for the thrill of the chase.
3 March 2019
Backstage in a lower hall of Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, Sébastien Meunier—artistic director of Ann Demeulemeester—spoke simply and eloquently of the thinking behind his Fall show. “Fashion is like rock music. There is no rock music without rebellion.”He furthered that by citing the period, and youth-driven fervor, around the emergence of the Antwerp Six circa the early 1980s (Demeulemeester was one of them). “The time was full of super-activity, and it was a bit anarchic,” said Meunier. “I went for something that had this energy, a big mix, more rock, and less romantic, than what I’ve done before.”It was indeed a more texturally and chromatically varied Ann Demeulemeester show than what’s become expected of the house. Though, in that, the collection did not sacrifice the label’s signature . . . let’s call it louche nostalgia. Velvety elongated shirts, in ruby or emerald, flowed with an after-hours sense of go-with-it ease, likewise bathrobe-silhouette tops and coats. One notable mini-series was a group of cobweb-knit sweaters, again giving off a tone of freewheeling, thrown-on and nonconforming expressiveness. Floral jacquards, shearling, bandanas, and fur accents rounded the “big mix” Meunier was aiming for, and all together, as strobe lights flashed and Siouxsie and the Banshees pumped through the sound system, one felt that rock ’n’ roll feedback.An important point of observation, beyond the clothes: It would have been heartening to see a cast with more people of color.
18 January 2019
If for the Ann Demeulemeester Spring collection Sébastien Meunier looked to an unwitting icon from the turn of the last century, it’s because there’s a backstory. Several, perhaps.Odd as it rings now, l’Inconnue de la Seine—an unknown teenager who drowned in Paris—was a young woman of such beauty that her death mask became a thing. Her smile in particular drew comparisons to a Mona Lisa of the early 20th century. Posthumously, she became a muse for artists and writers, including Rilke and Baudelaire.Backstage before the show, Meunier noted that a replica of the Inconnue is the first thing one sees upon entering his apartment. The object was a gift from collector friends. Since then, the girl has since become something of an obsession for him.In some ways this was a continuation of his recent men’s collection, which referenced the Symbolist movement. For women, Meunier’s outing ticked a lot of boxes: shades of old rose that are one of the bellwethers of Spring 2019; fabric treatments with a wet, unfinished sheen; and the trailing, tendril-like details that are something of a house signature. His romantic-nostalgic-melancholic tenor included lots of easy trousers, blouses, and nightdress-style looks that were floaty enough that they might have been suspended in water. The strongest looks included jackets, with or without a cluster of posies strewn around the neck. Trenches, coats, and full-length dresses conveyed a masculine/feminine allure. The Demeulemeester client will also feel right at home with the final series of long, floaty dresses—with or without the harness.“[The look is] always linked to my tastes and story—it’s something very personal,” said Meunier. “We don’t know a lot about her, so you can dream up lots of things and transpose your own world on it. You can imagine anything.”
28 September 2018
Today’s Ann Demeulemeester show began with an androgynous figure who looked to be in mourning: a large-brimmed hat swirling with black tulle concealed the face, a languid black suit extended down the body, and a hand gloved in lace held a blackened rose. The show ended with a timelessly feminine figure whose ivory lace dress, draped sweater, and large-brimmed hat swirling with ivory tulle suggested a pastoral bride. In between was a collection that would resonate with anyone who laments the death of clothes that emote (various versions of “She Moved Through the Fair,” a traditional Irish folk song, helped to cast a ghostly scene). “There’s a uniformity in garments today and I’m sure there are people who want to dream a bit more,” said designer Sébastien Meunier. “That’s the beauty of life—the possibility to dream.”He cited both the Symbolist and Decadent movements from the latter half of the 19th century—from the eerie prints of artist Odilon Redon (spot the eye in the second look) to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s bookAgainst Nature—as source material. While this predetermined an effective mix of period formality, moody flourish, and accessories featuring deer teeth (must wonder the sourcing there), it posed the inevitable costume conundrum: how to go out into the world without people thinking you’ve emerged from some fin de siècle wormhole.Meunier underscored that a show environment inevitably dials up the drama; pare back some pleated layers, waistcoats, and headgear, and the silk jacquard jackets and linen pants skip several dozen decades to reach relevance. Note, too, the relaxed tailoring just a few shades shy of millennial pink. Most important, the garments were reconstructed in ways that would have been unfathomable circa 1880—from exposed linings to smocked-collar tops stopping just shy of the midriff. Compared to all the raw-edged cropped pants and flattering footwear, these pieces were novelties; yet the lace gloves and feminine deshabille aspect transferred to men was rather seductive. It may even have suggested high-concept decadence—bygone moral decay in the wake of contemporary gender fluidity.
22 June 2018
Underneath that cool Parisian exterior, Sébastien Meunier nurtures a provocative streak. Carrying over from the romantic, William Blake–themed men’s collection he showed in January, the designer decided to explore a more nuanced, Gothic-tinged tale for his women’s collection.The result, as Meunier put it, was “a little bit more Mary Shelley—they have something in common, but this is stronger, slightly more dense and activist,” he said. Where the men’s show highlighted innocence, the women’s outing focused on “experience.” Strength and darkness are implicit in that. There was also a flirtation with bondage because, as the designer allowed, “there’s always a little notion of constraint in our collections.”On the runway, that translated into the deconstructed, paint-it-black kind of clothes Demeulemeester fans adore. Short peplum skirts in soft layers of fabric mixed with bodysuits, bustiers, and tailored jackets strung with double-dose belts and accessorized with what may be the sexiest gloves of the season. The corset trend got considerable play in wide leather belts that laced up the sides. Elsewhere, pieces were sliced, diced, shortened, turned inside out, and otherwise tweaked until they were raw. Occasionally, Meunier offered painterly gathered and draped white tops that, taken separately, gave the collection a bit more room to breathe. A couple of coats, like the sweeping black trench or the shearling number that followed right after, hit the sweet spot. “They’re more somber, prickly, and seasoned, and they are free to play every character they want,” the designer noted. “It’s less romantic and more noir.” Interpret that as you will.
2 March 2018
A poetry reference for a label whose spirit leans so poetic runs the risk of being too, you know, literal. But William Blake was not a one-dimensional bard; he was an enlightened artist who happened to be an ongoing inspiration for Ann Demeulemeester—so much so that Sébastien Meunier’s first collection at her side several years ago drew from the British Romantic.Today, in adopting Blake’s work for himself, the designer composed a collection that was sensitively expressed from start to finish. Having been most moved bySongs of Innocence and of Experience, written and illustrated between 1789 and 1794, he featured the book’s faded color cover on a velvet-ribboned tank worn with an undone blouse and buttoned breeches in painterly hues.The book’s exploration of the soul’s contrary states ostensibly motivated Meunier’s juxtaposition of softly historical silhouettes with a moody, masculine edge. For every waist delicately defined with an extra-long strand of strass, he augmented cuffs outward like architectural forms. And while the guys’ looks were prone to a suspended state of undress, the women were never as exposed, which felt deliberate in one sense and like a non-event in another. To be sure, those who gravitate toward Demeulemeester almost certainly arrive with fluid notions of gender. As for enticing everyone else, the costume aspects that continue to make these clothes so suited to musicians and their ilk read as a romantic antidote to the trend against anything profound.“It’s interesting to see how beautiful and sensible you can be, but then go to the darkness,” Meunier said, referring to the talented, tormented musician Syd Barrett, whose song “Golden Hair” accompanied the show like a sung poem. With this thought, he also distilled down his design to an ever-shifting balancing act between heart and head. The crowd clearly felt something, rewarding his effort with such applause to summon up the words of Blake:To see heaven in these wild flowers.
19 January 2018
It’s quite challenging to review some clothes, good as they are, when you’re transfixed by a paragon of cymbal-clashing, life-affirming, rhythm-begetting, totally free gorgeousness. Sadly (not really!), that task today fell to me.Sébastien Meunier, in all his feather-strewn naïveté, recruited the band Warhaus, of which he is a fan, to play at this relocated (thank God), changed-up (thank Him or Her again) Demeulemeester show. Warhaus—of which I shamefully had not a previous inkling—drifted up to play. And, jeez, they were good. Especially Sylvie Kreusch, in Meunier-fashioned thigh-highs and a long white T-shirt and black silky overshirt, moving like a spring tide–affected swell.For the collection, we had reverted to menswear’s Robert Mapplethorpe x Patti Smith dialectic. Really, though, it was just feathered Gothic semi-stripped lush existentialism à la Meunier. We glimpsed disassembled suiting. Crooned to feathered headdresses. Sung along to stenciled messages that reflected the creative potential, if not the naivety, of the designer’s muse. If you are into this, you’ll be pleased, and may have ordered it already. If not, look up Warhaus and revel in Kreusch’s fireworks.
28 September 2017
Sébastien Meunier said that for this collection he had decided to focus on a very specific inspiration: “It was about Robert Mapplethorpe in his life at the Chelsea Hotel . . . . We wanted to give homage to thisbohèmeperiod that was very creative in the ’70s and ’80s in New York.”It was pretty much the perfect theme for this designer. Those mournful florals that rested under each model’s chin, the “look at my picture” tank top, the sleeveless jean jacket delivered in ridged white linen, and the handsome silk robes and pants worn by some of the older models (as Mapplethorpe himself did in his later years) were all literal references to the photographer. The Meunier-staple strapping, buckling, and a pulled-apartness that saw macs and a beautiful ocher silk corduroy jacket cut open at the back to reveal the wearer’s spine were all more gentle insinuations of kink. There were a great many women’s looks here—more of them than usual, it seemed. Was Demeulemeester going coed on the sly? Not quite.“It’s a men’s show, but of course we have a women’s pre-collection, too,” explained the designer. “It’s something that we have to present. But I want to present it in a beautiful way for the story—not forced. It is the story of Mapplethorpe and Patti [Smith].” That story was nicely told.
23 June 2017
Sébastien Meunier injected extra melancholy into the already wanly pensive Ann Demeulemeester template today by shrouding a large proportion of his usually less masculine looks in starched lace veils. “This is a very romantic girl who mixes all her lace and old garments,” said Meunier backstage. “She wants to go and party, but in a different mood.” As Nico sang “All Tomorrow’s Parties” in a tone that suggested she expected never to party again, Meunier’s artfully unraveled hedonists walked in a strongly concocted mix of 19th-century clerical attire and 19th-century bedlam attire, with all the requisite feathers and straps fluttering from cuffs and hems. Boots, jackets, waistcoats, and more were (as per usual) often fastened at the back: Panne velvet coats and pants in aubergine and deep marine green, plus some very diluted pastel laces and silks, injected a welcome counterpoint to the staple monochromatic palette. This label aims to dress a woman who likes to semaphore her complicatedness through her clothes, and this season it presented a compelling uniform for mooching. Whether she’d be a laugh at a party or spend the night chain-smoking Marlboro Reds angrily while pressuring the DJ to play Bauhaus, The Smiths, and more Nico is, however, debatable.
2 March 2017
That curled cursive that ran here and there throughout this collection when etched onto the models read “l’avenir,” or future. And as clothes for palely loitering in the present while wistfully looking forward, these were lovely costumes for the cosmetically contemplative. Sébastien Meunier presented looks in which a composite of ingredients were presented in differently disassembled combinations. These included white shirting, lace, and ruffles, its black equivalents (but less of), darkly textured tailoring cinched by strap or slashed at idiosyncratic spots, and the odd bit of fur (lining outerwear, or as richly dyed personal plumage pads, and lace bralettes or pec-covering high mini-waistcoats). To top it all off were wide-brimmed hats garlanded with feathered flourish.The gossamer lightness of the shirting in lace, gauze, or cotton and sometimes double layered at different lengths, contrasted finely against the moody heaviness above it. The combinations, although all varied in their detailing, became repetitive—this was a big collection—but when there were exceptions to the majority like a brown suit, a shinily striped skinny-fit top, a couple of loose-knit parchment-color sweaters above skinny-ish soft pants, and the fur and velvet near the end, they were delicious exceptions.
20 January 2017
Maybe it seems hissy to harp on about punctuality. A tune about “fashion world problems” merits the world’s smallest violin. Yet the team atAnn Demeulemeesteris so consistently late—at both menswear and womenswear—that the suspicion that they cultivate extravagant lateness as try-hard affectation becomes more compelling every super-late show. This show didn’t even open its doors until 15 minutes after the advertised start time. After 30 minutes or so, the photographers shushed as if to cosmically order some of Sébastien Meunier’s clothes on to the runway. The pregnant, unamused, and clothesless silence hung in the air for a minute or so. But of course, they weren’t ready backstage. I had a sportsman’s bet with someone that the earliest possible starting time would be 42 minutes late. By then the photographers were still whistling in vain.Were the clothes that started floating forth four minutes later worth the wait? Sure, they were fine. This was Demeulemeester coded meditations on controlled chaos. There was a long sequence of monochromatic and disassembled tailoring, with jackets and frock-coats that twisted into dresses and half-cut shirts. Straps flapped and feathers hung on wide-strung necklaces or collars. This was a party-at-the-back collection: many of the plucked-asunder jumbles of bib, body, and collar were cut open at the back to meet at the top of the spine. Other loosely cut, gently frayed white smocks were worn wide and low at the back, as if half-pulled down by an 18th-century bosun preparing to flog some errant cabin boy. Similarly the round-toed oil leather or suede work boots were cut open to reveal the heel.A suite of red-on-black then purple-on-black striping interjected to break the monotony of monochrome with silky variations on the ongoing aesthetic. Sometimes it looked as if these outfits—and their wearers—had started the day in a symmetric little Le Smoking, but fallen into a laundry machine just before it whirred into final cycle. But careful styling kept the bedlam controlled. Two of the models had “True Black” written on their chests, while on another the same was written on her opaque shirt. There was no time afterwards to find out why.
29 September 2016
Sometimes written on the garments, at others on the bodies of the men and women who wore them, the capitalized phraseI AM RED WITH LOVEdeclared Sébastien Meunier’s mood at thisAnn Demeulemeestershow today. “Rebel in love,” the designer semi-clarified backstage. “Love is a colorful emotion for me. And we can say also I am black with love. But we blush and we become a bit red when we are in love, so there is all of that. I wanted to give something that was a bit shy—emotion, charming emotion.”There was certainly a torn romance to this monochrome-dominated—but red-flashed—collection. Ribbons and chainlets of beads tipped with dyed red feathers hung from loose, soft asymmetrical outfits. The broad wide and ruffled arm shape on a silk shirt was revived as a stand-alone sleeve later in the show. White silk standards printed with a bird or disassembled abstracts—and possibly at one point a photograph of a dog—were draped around bodies like flags to signify deep meaningfulness. There were some attractive multi-fabric patterned military jackets in a burgundy-touched red.The parent in this critic slightly worried for these rebels in love: so many trappings hung so loose and long from them that the wonderful cautionary montage fromThe Incredibles, about the perilous impracticality of capes, sprang to mind. But health and safety are the sometime enemies of artistry, and a number of Meunier’s delicate disassemblies did show artistry consistent with the Demeulemeester code of wearableangoisse.
24 June 2016
When a show runs 43 minutes late (due to the wrong time-zone arrival of some Frenchgrande fromage, and no fault of the label), there is a lot of opportunity to speculate about the delights ahead. Thanks to an invitation illustrated by a close-up of tousled hair on a bare back, the best guess seemed to be a feminized reprise of creative director Sébastien Meunier’s borderline trichophiliac menswear ode to Apollonian beauty. When at last the looks emerged, however, it became clear that his feminine cipher for next winter had fallen (and was reveling in it). Meunier said afterward the music was an important signifier. The two-entry playlist eddied between “Screen Shot” by Swans (sample lyric: “No pain, no death, no fear, no hate, no time, no now, no suffering”) and a depressive cover of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” So . . . not upbeat. As Meunier said, “We all want to have no pain when we love, but in reality we all have it—and it also makes life.” Oof.That translated into a long reflection on gently exploded masculine attire. Black topcoats featured yawing hemlines and the odd loose strap. The waistcoat was promoted into a metaphor for depth via carefully sculpted, counterintuitive layering. The odd metallic flash—and later slim pants and another topcoat in silver metallic fabric—provided a bit of roughage to temper the noir. So did an abstract print of out-of-focus streetlights reproduced on slim leather pants, wide-cuffed wool pants, a ribbed semi-sheer turtleneck, and—yes—another topcoat. Thai pant–style overfolding occasionally graced Meunier’s trousers, and there were a few folded split skirts and dresses inserted to broaden the rubber-sole–shod silhouette a little, too. That hair tease on the invitation wasn’t totally plucked from the air—the models all wore plaits of dark horsehair insinuated within the knotted disarray of their own hair. This was a collection to wear while moodily smoking 20 unfiltered Gitanes at a sidewalk café.
3 March 2016
When you thrill with momentary hope that the pneumatic drill starting up outside is in fact the show music—then experience chagrin when it’s not—the show is starting much too late. At last, some languorous piano. We started with blue one-button fil coupe not-quite-suiting, with contrast shawl collars in turmeric and integrated chest coverings. Black shoes were embroidered with silk viscose patches of indeterminate pattern. This silhouette slowly dissolved to be replaced with a thorough meditation on the permutations of layered outerwear: included were a herringbone weave denim-ish coat over a long alpaca jacket of white and shades-of-mustard, and a soft mohair black silk jacket integrated into a green zip-up below. Low vented topcoats, jackets, and kicky pants in camel mohair were lightly tangled by knotted bobbles of texture. The collection became more and more textured—hairier. That embroidery previously glimpsed on the shoes had a broader canvas on a high-slung, wide-waistband bomber as well as a leather waistcoat that was worn under a dark coat with scarlet flashes of shoe and mohair-mix check shirt cuff. Close to the climactic relaxation back to darker versions of the opening suiting we saw a short-sleeved—rather than pulled-up, as per all other looks—coat in honey that featured an impressive blow-dried-poodle eruption of volume on sleeves and shoulder. There were also mane accessories, strips of black leather from which fell a long fringe of recently-seen-a-colorist blonde highlight-hair.So why all the hair? Sebastian Meunier said afterward: “I speak of Apollo and his beauty. . . . I wanted all the elements of what makes a beautiful body and a beautiful aspect and a beautiful soul. I wanted to make it very generous, visible, and not too tight.” Meunier’s lock-strewn vision of Apollonian hotness was an intensely wrought thing.
22 January 2016
On heels so soaring that the average height of these looks was within a whisper of six and a half feet, this Ann Demeulemeester collection trod pointedly around themes of personal expression, recreational repression, and commercial concession. The topstitched paneled black tailoring of which the facades veered from biker to tuxedo, the painstakingly ruched black leather pants, and the backless black tank tops–slash-waistcoats with a melee of obi-belt knotting at the navel were all no-brainer ticks on a buyer’s list. The Demeulemeester codes factor in waft and sheerness, so more ticks—although perhaps applied a touch less firmly—at the lightly fitted, transparent racer-back silk dresses, sometimes metallically agleam, and long jackets in softly acid, blurrily animal greens and yellows.Artistic directorSebastien Meuniersaid the collection was titled Rising and that his starting point was the angular unreality of Alberto Giacometti, then added: “It is about the extreme elegance of women; how tall, how bright, how mysterious they can be. I pushed them in a super-elegant, kinky, sadomasochist form.” This explained the choker-topped harnesses that were sometimes effective—who knew a white harness under black suiting complemented by white sunglasses could be an uncreepily powerful accessory arsenal? Yet S&M motifs speak of subjugation—albeit consensual—as well as power and so seem only queasily reconcilable with the runway. The oily chartreuse feathering on sleeves and coral-like clusters of quills were here thanks to Meunier’s collaboration on this collection with artist Kate MccGwire. The quilled pieces were simultaneously beautiful and sad, organic reductions into abstraction for the sake of it. This lineup lacked the uplift that Meunier’s last menswear outing seemed to augur. Yet for those who enjoy pain, this was not a pleasure to watch—because it was fine.
1 October 2015
Color, directness, asymmetry, and conceit. Even for those less fluently intimate with the language of Ann Demeulemeester—and the suddenly interjected accent of its designer Sébastien Meunier—this collection presented an explicit point of view and attitude. Tightish sleeveless denim-style jackets in black or white were often the anchor around which Meunier's currents swirled; beneath them were sleeves and pulled-up, popped-back shirt cuffs, and the drop hems of untucked shirts. Lower still came pants, sometimes gauzily transparent in Meunier's ramped-up burnt orange and dark emerald color scheme. These colors and the contrasts of monochrome were usually utilized as punctuation marks to emphasize the contours of his apparently jumbled but, in fact, exhaustively landscaped strata. Sheer pants will be a giant leap for many men. Not all of Meunier's conversations flowed. But enough did, and in a direction that felt energizing-ly liberated from Demeulemeester's gravitational pull.Afterward, Meunier enunciated that sense of respectful liberation, saying of this collection: "This was a research of love. But it is a research that is in between the traditional love and something more energetic, something more young and fresh that is not too formal. We want to refresh our atmosphere in something that is Ann Demeulemeester today. She worked with her emotion, and I speak about mine with hopefully the same poetry but in a different tension. When you have the responsibility with this kind of house, you first have to respect it. And to show that—I'm an old one of the house and I know Ann very well—well, I have shown that. But I need to show my own heart and my own self."As the musical accompaniment to the show warmed up, a recording played of James Cernan, an astronaut who was part of the mission that captured the first photograph of Earth from space, reflecting on his experience staring back at the world. In it he said: "You have to literally just pinch yourself and ask yourself the question, silently: Do you know where you are at this point in time and space, and in reality and in existence, when you can look out the window and you're looking at the most beautiful star in the heavens? The most beautiful because it's the one we understand and we know, it's home, it's people, family, love, life." That idea of standing apart from something beloved only to see it anew felt joyfully relevant to this collection.
26 June 2015
When Ann Demeulemeester left fashion's fray for good two years ago, she declared: "It is the first time I feel like I don't have a rope around my neck." Today it was again Sébastien Meunier's head in the noose. Following a vexingly drawn-out delay—by the end of which the room had fallen so numbly silent that you could hear squabs mewling above the rafters—he touched on the tropes of the founder with fair efficiency.Acting as centerpiece for many of his looks were broad, black, and be-zipped obi belts that came in various grades of jaunty tilt and unzipperedness. As much decorative frontispieces as pant stabilizers, they narrowed at the back. Around these—and some skinny equivalents—were cinched the moody fabric flesh of Meunier's Demeulemeester tribute. Soft-shouldered jackets and coats most often in black, or narrowing black-and-white stripes, were as rich with extraneous fold and flap on the body as they were with swell and billow at the arm. A bronze silk topcoat was straitjacketed with strapping and buttons. South of the obi belts, full trousers moved with soft, unreadable smokiness or were fitted, leather and ruching in sympathy with the melodramatic, long-armed black leather gloves—sometimes of mismatched length—worn with every look.Meunier is not Demeulemeester, yet to fulfill his brief must be Demeulemeester-ish. It is an unenviable position. But you could absolutely argue that this cover version is too dutiful an homage and bears insufficient imprint of his own authorship. The founder's rejected rope fits Meunier snugly enough. Yet the flatness of the atmosphere today—and the emptiness of the benches—suggests that, shorn of its star turn, the appeal of this same old song is waning.
5 March 2015
There are certain things you come to always expect at an Ann Demeulemeester show: a flood of black stomping boots, brooding romanticism for lanky, melancholic characters who look like a cross between apoète mauditand a rock star. The anthology published by Rizzoli this past fall, with its endless succession of identical-size images and nearly identical looks, epitomized the consistency of the Demeulemeester vocabulary. There was all of that in today's show, held as usual in the solemn spaces of the Couvent des Cordeliers. But it was different. Evidently different. The boots were flame red, for instance, while the black was broken by sudden flashes of color. The romanticism was still present, but it got sturdier.A little more than a year has passed since Ann left the house she built. Her lieutenant, Sébastien Meunier, took the reins, but so far he has proven to be way too faithful to the code. This season saw him breaking the mold, to his own advantage. "I am slowly starting to add my sensibility, which is very close to the one that shaped the house, but not identical," said Meunier, whose inspiration was a very personal mix of the sentimental, the pictorial, and the chaotic. By his own admission, in fact, he tried to convey the tumult of love as a feeling, slicing and cutting garments with the same resoluteness of thenouveau réalisteartist Arman, whose installations comprised accumulations of found objects carefully destroyed this way and that. Meunier's color palette was an homage to the way Vermeer played with shadow and light.If it all sounds a tad random, it was not: Meunier's chaos was crystalline. The long silhouette had that trademark Demeulemeester flow, but what kept happening inside—the contours, with parts of the jackets going askew, insides being shown outside, zippers dangling—felt fresh. With its militaristic allure and sense of spontaneity, this collection was an interesting exercise in punk tailoring. At times Meunier got a bit carried away by the slicing fury, but all in all it was nice to finally see some movement.
23 January 2015
When Sébastien Meunier took over as creative director of Ann Demeulemeester last season, he was being handed a poisoned chalice. As these things go, it probably seemed like an easy gig—the look that Ann herself established is so identifiable and distinctive, surely all that would be required is a seasonal re-scrambling of the essential elements: some deconstructed tailoring here, a bit of smudgy layering there. Black and white. Sensual textures. Some diaphanous wafting. Presto! Collection à la Ann. The trouble—the poison, as it were—is that Meunier is far from the only designer who has figured out the Demeulemeester codes: They're not exactly a secret. Indeed, they've infiltrated the look and attitude of fashion far and wide. And so a lazy approach at Demeulemeester yields results like the ones on the brand's catwalk today, a gloomy procession of models wearing what looked like better-than-average Demeulemeester knockoffs. Some nice pieces? Yes, here and there—the embroidered sheaths and maxi dresses had presence, for instance, and there was appealing outerwear, such as an ivory and black motorcycle jacket and a crinkly sheer white lab coat. The impact of the strong items was dulled, however, by dumb ones such as the long piece of lavender chiffon impersonating a top, or a dress, or a one-shoulder apron. Or something. The whole effort here felt rather "or something." It seemed like Meunier's heart wasn't really in it, and he was relying on the established brand vocabulary and the signature Demeulemeester attitude to sell the collection. He should try harder next time.
25 September 2014
In fashion, succession can happen with more or less fanfare, depending on any combination of factors. At the end of the Ann Demeulemeester show today, Sébastien Meunier emerged to take credit for the collection in the absence of Demeulemeester herself. The French protégé spent four years at the Belgian designer's side until she departed elusively last fall. In simplest terms, this was a Demeulemeester collection: The absence of color, the wistful styling, the visual rhythm of loose and lean—all the genetic markers expressed in her designs over the past thirty years were there. Longtime customers need not fear a sea change, and Meunier deserves recognition for that. Backstage, he addressed the imperative to preserve the poetry of raw and refined, citing Louise Bourgeois and Robert Rauschenberg while pointing to toile artist smocks with lightly frayed edges and canvas lace-ups fronted with painted flowers. Outer layers embroidered with bronzed wheat sheaves conjured up the handcraft of yesteryear, while jackets spliced and stitched in translucent cotton vertical stripes suggested the handcraft of tomorrow. Coats were unlined to allow for more layers. Pants remained lean, their cuffs often rolled.Pursuant to the artist references, you got the feeling that these clothes were for someone who revels in rumpled nonchalance while abiding by an innate sense of polish. The superposition of unfinished shirts and sartorial jacket construction struck an appealing note. A few rumblings overheard among the exiting crowd lamented the end of an era—or named one or two other sensitive avant-gardists who might fill the void Demeulemeester has left. But for now, Meunier has given no reason to object to this incarnation of Ann Demeulemeester. The real test will be a few seasons on, when the brand must prove it can progress without its heart and soul.
26 June 2014
Since she struck out as one of the Antwerp Six in the mid-eighties, Ann Demeulemeester's clothes have not exactly been noted for their pop-tastic cheer. Right from the start, Demeulemeester made punkish understatement her trend-proof calling card—in so doing, she earned the undying loyalty of fans such as Patti Smith, who was also her muse. Like Smith, Demeulemeester was interested in depth, not froth, and understood that melancholy could be a kind of ecstatic experience if you engaged it from the right angle. When the designer showed her first collection in Paris, in 1992,The Washington Postadmired her aesthetic's "sultry bleakness," an apt phrase that has continued to apply over the years. She did not veer.Last fall, Demeulemeester announced—without explanation, really, and via handwritten letter—that she was leaving her label. The show this afternoon was the first one made in her absence. For the moment, at least, it appears that the team designing under Demeulemeester's name is determined to double-down on her reputation for moodiness, jettisoning last season's patterns and prints in favor of more "signature" pieces. The women's clothes shown here were mainly of brackish dark colors, deconstructed, twisted, folded, and wrapped. Any hint of the upbeat came from a handful of men's looks that featured bolts of flashy bronze, and from a final passage of languid women's ensembles in white and palest pink. The latter were really lovely—a show highlight, for sure, alongside a few intriguing double-breasted silk dresses. The Demeulemeester woman should also be satisfied with this collection's brooding but rather sexy gowns, and with the low-slung, voluminous trousers. The Demeulemeester man, meanwhile, may be tempted by a gothic coat of Persian lamb, but will probably wind up with a blazer in a tonal flock, as well he should. Also, the bronze trousers and jean jacket looked good today: They had pep. You did sort of wonder whether Demeulemeester herself would approve.
26 February 2014
The first bite is taken with the eye; so say the Japanese about food. In fashion, that might translate into the impression generated by a designer's invitation. Ann Demeulemeester's was an expensive envelope, no address. The details of the show were printed on the inside flap. Totally interior. Just like the clothes, which were, according to Demeulemeester, all about a woman whose instinctive, utterly natural eccentricity inevitably finds outward expression in the way she dresses.Something about that particular scenario suggestedSunset Boulevard,and there was indeed a Hollywood Gothic something in Demeulemeester's extraordinary flocking effects, spread across jackets and dresses, crawling up tulle-clad legs. Demeulemeester's woman has often been a warrior, but here you imagined a room with thick velvet curtains closed against the daylight, in which a creature of the night would languidly sprawl in poetic layers of flocked silk. Should she be compelled to venture into the outside world, it would be in a long, filmy skirt with a decorous pelmet underlay. And, in the interests of communicating her fuck-you eccentricity to the humans whose paths she'd cross, what more would she need than one of Ann's wild-is-the-windneu-wimples?
25 September 2013
When even Ann Demeulemeester, poetess of twilight and shadows, is showing flowers, you know you've got an irresistible trend. Her Spring collection was crawling with wisteria vines, flocked in velvet on her customary cutaway tailcoats, jackets, and shirts. "I had to find a way to do flowers my way," she said. Theywereblack. But the whole collection had an unusual lightness, in effect and in color. "It's very romantic, very happy," Demeulemeester said. "We asked ourselves the meaning of a Sunday afternoon. Something light and easy, with a bit of humor." The gauzy layers and crumpled tailoring endured, but the blossoming of the collection couldn't help but sweeten the mood. With Devendra Banhart burbling on the soundtrack, colored lights haloing the stage, and a little straw cloche or two bobbing on top, the tone was serene, even silly now and then. The stripes Demeulemeester always returns to often conjure thoughts of jailbirds. Here they saidcircus!Demeulemeester's most ascetic fans may be disappointed to find that she has a sense of levity, but the collection did offer a new lens on a line whose contours are well known. It also provided new insight into the designer. "This is private Ann, on Sundays," said Demeulemeester. "People don't know, but I love my garden."
27 June 2013
There have been times when Ann Demeulemeester's womenswear has been inspired by real-life poetesses, artists, adventuresses. The clear, forceful vision shaping today's show felt like one of those times. So, Ann, who was the real woman behind this collection? The designer paused for one perfectly timed beat, smiled, and answered emphatically, "Me." Of course. Who else? No poetess needed: This particular lineup of clothes was such quintessential Demeulemeester that it was practically a manifesto. "I made everything I like," she said. And that meant, in a word, duality. Black and white, male and female, fluid and constructed, fragile and strong. All of it rolled together in one polymorphous package.If Demeulemeester has toyed with the ethereal of late, she earthed her new designs in heavy, laced-up boots. Her signature, solid layering of short-over-long waistcoats, jackets, and coats will always suggest highwaywomen and Napoleonic army deserters in equal measure, but here even the longest, floatiest pieces could have garbed both princess and parish priest equally well for martyrdom—the purest picked out for death by fire. The smudged-eye makeup hinted at the penitence of Lent. There aren't many—any?—designers who can curry such flights of fancy, but there also aren't any other designers who set the mood of their shows with Nick Cave crooning, "They've hung the mermaids from the streetlights by their hair." That image alone was enough to incline you toward a fin de siècle scenario for Demeulemeester's presentation. But if it was to be a last stand, the designer sheathed her women in obis and breastplates of stiff black leather, the poetry underpinned by a core of tough resistance: "What we need today," she declared.
27 February 2013
The invitation to Ann Demeulemeester's new show was a white handkerchief, the backdrop of the stage a scrim of pure white fabric. Fall may call for heavier fabrics and weight, but the collection Demeulemeester presented today was all aflutter. "I didn't want it to be too heavy," she said backstage after the show. "It had to do with making something really serene and spiritual, but also powerful." She had a phrase for it: punk priest.There was certainly a vestment quality in the constructed waistcoats that trailed trains of shirttail, the long robe coats, and billowing sleeves, some with double cuffs at the end. ("I love cuffs," Demeulemeester shrugged by way of explanation. "I think it gives something beautiful to the hand.") She cautioned that spirituality was linked to no religion or faith. It's more the Church of Ann that her men are the acolytes of. Over the years, she's honed her design signatures into a creed, which may explain why this collection, long on loveliness, felt a bit short on spark. Serenity doesn't carry the shock of the new, and "punk," despite its rip-it-up, start-again connotations, can mean merely independent. That's how Demeulemeester chose to define it. "Free in spirit," she said, "but with a future." Certain recurring details, like the curved, constructed sleeve whose technique was borrowed from couture, and beautiful embroidery throughout, were reminiscent of a confessional window, and pointed toward her own.It all left you feeling that, yes, a peaceful punk is a powerful one. Demeulemeester is often associated with darkness and shade, but the designer insisted she's a bearer of light. "I'm a very positive person," she said. "I see the side I want to see." She's good at making you see her side, too. The voice on her soundtrack, which had sounded angelically sweet, turned out to be Nick Cave, who lent "O Children" and a new song, yet to be released, for the show. Demeulemeester's vision turns even Bad Seeds good.
17 January 2013
"Beauty can be frightening," Ann Demeulemeester declared today. Quite what she meant by that was semi-clarified by a show that was, she said, inspired by "the duality of butterflies," solid bug versus ethereal wings. So it figured that her new collection was a thing of strong extremes. Her butterflies didn't flutter by—they kicked butt. There was a flavor of manga martial arts in the super-short, corset-belted dresses and jackets over jackets. They represented a tough new stance for Demeulemeester. "Without losing the poetry," she was quick to add: That came in the form of pagan priestesses in floor-sweeping gowns. But even those outfits were edged in by anatomical leather harnesses.It was time, the designer felt, for something new. A new sleeve, for instance. As Demeulemeester hiked skirts, she let sleeves fly away like wings, or she folded them closer to the body, like wings at rest. The long, flowing silk gowns, on the other hand, had a different kind of airiness, billowing rather than streaming, neo-medieval, monastic. "I didn't knowwhatyear it was," Demeulemeester said post-show. Year zero, perhaps, of a new chapter in her career.And how did beauty have the potential to be frightening? For Demeulemeester, it was all about that insectoid duality. Light and dark. Beautiful and deadly.
26 September 2012
Categorizing __Ann Demeulemeester’__s collectionblanche—her white collection, in the somewhat unlikely event you needed the translation—as resort isn’t strictly accurate. It’s not that the clothes won’t appear in stores the same time the rest of this pre-spring season does—they will, absolutely. Yet unlike other designers’ resort, with their emphasis on newness, newness, newness, the Antwerp designer is instead offering the known, known, known. Since 2008, Demeulemeester has been making a trawl through the archives from her near 30 years designing, and reintroducing whatever she feels is right and relevant for the moment. Far from being as easy as that might sound, it’s actually where the real work kicks in. After all, you’d better have something really worth bringing back if, as she has been doing, you want to make old ground feel like it’s worth walking on again. Of course, being Ann Demeulemeester, she does—many times over. This reissuing approach is an affirmation that she has been making some of the most fluidly tailored and poetically nuanced clothes of any designer of her generation, with her constant riffing on black trouser suits, cotton tanks, white shirts, men’s vests, pajama pants, et al. Somehow, in picking out the time-specific, she only serves to emphasize their timelessness.This last point clearly isn’t lost on the women who buy her clothes, who have been the prime movers in making the idea of this collection happen. So, if you’ve had a yen for the following, then come out later this year, you’ll be in luck: the “Holy” white cotton tank from spring 1998 (that show featured a sound track of Patti Smith reading an Allen Ginsberg poem); a black silk peignoir jacket from 2002 that was akin to the ones Demeulemeester had shown for her men’s spring 2013 just the previous day; an asymmetric white cotton shirt that can be worn whichever way (spring 2005); and a billowing black silk dress from 1993 that looks so startlingly perfect for right now, it’s enough to get Demeuelemeester aficionados logging on to eBay to find versions from back in the day. Demeulemeester, meanwhile, doesn’t limit herself only to clothes. Over in the showroom, a large, stately, structured handbag sits, that Demeulemeester is also reissuing. It’s capacious, but slim, and is an exact fascimile of the 1992 original. Well, almost. Open it, and there are a couple of inner pockets designed to take an iPhone, or a BlackBerry, or whatever tech gizmo wasn’t around 20 years ago.
In some ways, time never stands still.
27 August 2015
Ann Demeulemeester's place in fashion's pantheon is all but assured. But she's still got battles to wage. "I wanted to prove that color can fit into my world, too," she said after a show that brought almost unprecedented shades into her realms. It opened with deep-wine purples and grew to include flambéed orange and sea blue, too.That's not to say the shift in palette radically altered Demeulemeester's perspective. Ann's man is, as ever, a Romantic and a sojourner. The Oriental resonances of the shapes she showed for Spring underscored this. Side-tied silk kimono tops took the place of waistcoats, bubbling out from beneath jackets, trailing sashes behind. That other designers—most notably Haider Ackermann, who also favors jewel tones—have trod this particular silk road didn't lessen its effect. Demeulemeester made it her own by undercutting Byronic preciousness with ease. She loosened her oftentimes stricter silhouette with wide, soft pants, some printed with casual stripes or graphic roses. They met her criteria for her own work: "sophisticated, strange, and strong."Who—to paraphrase—wanders among the wanderers? Demeulemeester does. As much as her muse, she's a restless spirit. "There's this strange kind of freedom," she said of her man. "It's for someone who's really free." Count her in his company.
28 June 2012
Ann Demeulemeester's is sure to be one of the most extravagant tonsorial statements of the season: hair spiked by Eugene Souleiman, charged with feathers like a Navajo warrior, or like a classic fashion illustration by Antonio Lopez. "Construction, shape, architecture," Demeulemeester's three touchstones for the season, were instantly broadcast by her models' heads, yet with a wanton eroticism that automatically elevated the clothes. Imagine the outfits Lisbeth Salander would splurge on when she suddenly felt inclined by her financial chicanery toward high fashion.Demeulemeester's new designs had Salander's kick-ass, high-performance quality. There was a pointy sharpness to the layered scarf hems on leather jackets that suggested warrior action. As did the stiffened sculptural leather neckpieces. And the strict linear quality of suits made of bias-cut, funnel-necked jackets and pencil skirts provided a fierce new silhouette for the designer.The designer was so exercised by this new direction that she insisted she had no need for decoration or color. Nevertheless, there was a sumptuously luminous blue ("the color of night," she said) that made the collection so much more interesting. As Demeulemeester's husband Patrick sagely said backstage, "If you do architecture, it has to be something people can live in."
29 February 2012
Ann Demeulemeester felt that her Spring collection for men marked the end of a story, in much the same way that the collection's inspiration, Arthur Rimbaud, the boy king of poetic decadence, reached the end of the line in a remote African outpost 120 years ago. For Fall, the designer felt it was time to man up, with something more graphic, maybe even abstract. "But strong inmyway," she quickly added. In other words, Ann's Rimbaud was never going to go Rambo on us. He did, however, absorb more tribal influences into his mode of dress.That was obvious in the reworked silhouettes and rethought proportions. The high-waisted, hyper-tailored elegance of old surrendered to a much more straightforward elongation, as in sweater dresses that plunged floorward, or mid-calf shirtdresses in gauzy fabrics, both worn over legging-narrow pants. There was something Celtic about the result. The man who wore the black and red T-shirt dress (which needle-punched gauzy wool and cotton together) would, more likely, be illuminated by the glow of a sacrificial Druidic pyre than the guttering wick of a bookish Flemish candle. The same pagan mood was captured in an outfit that layered a blazer over a long zipped top over a long shirt over baggy culottes over leggings.The transition between the last chapter and the next wasn't entirely successful for Demeulemeester—too many darn dresses—and the designer may have realized that herself, because she wasn't so willful as to turn her back on the romantic looks that her fans crave, like the cavalry officer's coat or the cutaway jacket. When she introduced some sky blue duchesse, it was as though this was not so much an end as an epilogue. Demeulemeester's man was simply layering worlds old and new on the road to find out.
20 January 2012
Ann Demeulemeester has been dreaming about the kind of adventuress that Arthur Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century poet hero of her men's Spring collection, might have come across during his self-imposed exile in Africa. Demeulemeester even has a bio for her. Isabelle Eberhardt was a Swiss writer who traveled extensively in North Africa in the late nineteenth century. She usually wore men's clothing, because she had more freedom of movement that way. In one photograph from her brief life, Eberhardt is dressed as a sailor. "I had to invent her," Demeulemeester said, minus the Indiana Jones hats, one hopes. But, in Eberhardt's case, truth truly was stranger than fiction, and that made her a dream muse for the designer.The creature Demeulemeester created was part androgyne, part decadent, a poetic hybrid of East and West. As she did with her men's collection in June, Demeulemeester imagined a European wardrobe "infected" by the tribal dress her explorer encountered. That might start with something subtle like a striped, tailored blazer with tassels dangling off its buttons, or a trenchcoat de-structured till it was a soft kimonolike wrap. In the middle somewhere, there were slouchy openwork knits and a jacket over-embroidered to look utterly exhausted. Then came the more exotic pieces: the black silk tulle caftan with a trim of beads, the embroidered waistcoat with a trail of fringes. A sheer asymmetrical top and skirt appeared in an ombré that evoked a dust storm. With the spectral pulse of Harold Budd on the soundtrack sounding like mournful desert winds blowing through abandoned casbahs, Demeulemeester delivered one of her most seductive dissertations onla femme perdue.
28 September 2011
Ann Demeulemeester doesn't travel. "I never saw a desert," she said after her show. "It's in my head." And on her runway, which was covered with sand. The setting was enhanced by the desolate wind that howled on the soundtrack, and Nico's equally desolateDesertshore. Demeulemeester was reluctant to acknowledge the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud's self-exile in Africa as a major influence on her collection because she felt literalizing the mood would weaken its impact, but she needn't have worried. Even without the Rimbaud backstory, what came across was the idea of cultures interweaving: the cut and cloth of European clothes being slowly infected by orientalism and intangible mystery.The idea was obvious in the sheer silk tulle smocks that veiled almost everything. The formal shawl-collared jackets and waistcoats layered over tunics and britches were lifted straight from a poet-recently-turned-desert-nomad's wardrobe. Maybe that's why the clothes had a tougher edge than Demeulemeester's usual poetic romanticism. "Beauty is our weapon," her husband Patrick Robyn declared after the show. Rimbaud himself was, after all, a lover and a fighter.
24 June 2011
Erik Satie'sTrois Gymnopédies, one of the most exquisite pieces of music ever composed, set the mood for a particularly poetic collection from Ann Demeulemeester. And it came from a place that, in its own peculiar way, was poetic too. Backstage, the designer was wearing some silver jewelry she'd cast from birds' feet from her own backyard. That had got her thinking about animals in mythology, in particular the faun, half man, half goat. On her catwalk several models were head to toe in goat fur. With some the fur was touched with red, as if by the glow of a sunrise at the dawn of the world. More poetry.Demeulemeester's other models were hybrid creatures too, attenuated, black-clad, birdlike, their hair extended into feathery outcrops by Eugene Souleiman, their brows brushed to fierceness by Rudi Cremers. They brought to mind a lost tribe of Amazonian warrior women, bodies slung with belts and bandoliers that were loaded with feathers instead of bullets. It was a deliberately provocative metaphor, Demeulemeester's way of giving peace a chance—or so she claimed postshow—but these women nevertheless looked lean and mean enough to dip their quills in some exotic poison before sending them flying. Not for nothing the burst of Tchaikovsky and the echoes ofBlack Swan.The collection was truly about those belts: loose, trompe l'oeil attachments, corset-laced and bunching in the back like a bustle, crushing ruffles, forcing fabric into folds. With leather leggings, wedge boots, and one of Demeulemeester's laced jackets or waistcoats, they made for a strong, dramatic silhouette. "My job is to give beauty," said the designer, in which case she can fairly claim a bonus.
2 March 2011
Ann Demeulemeesterusually starts somewhere so absorbing with her inspirations it's easy to see how her collections take on such enthralling shapes. Her latest outing was no exception. She wondered what eighteenth-century visionary poet William Blake would be like if he came back in 2011. The poetic dreamer is a staple character in her repertoire, but thoughts of Blake brought a more elemental quality to her work. Earth, air, fire, and water provided the framework. Demeulemeester's usual monochrome palette was expanded by the orange of fire, the gold of the sun, the blue of the ocean. Prints of snow and comets and stars against the black of night added a suitably cosmic tinge. Blake's writing also got the designer thinking about mythology. She wanted her models to evoke Pegasus, so there was horse hair woven into their hair.But Demeulemeester is no airy fairy. She was quick to point out the new construction of her clothes, based around a series of precise horizontal cuts that left jackets and coats flying open. "It's not deconstruction," she said sharply, quite aware of the reputation that dogs her in the fashion world. "It's a new way to give movement." She was right. The hermetic layering of her clothing in the past had been opened up to the world, and it was inviting. Still, layering provided one of the collection's most alluring effects, with leggings and leather pants veiled in silk.Longtime muse Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, in Paris to perform last night, leapt to their feet at show's end. Putting the official seal of approval on a vintage Demeulemeester collection, Smith swooned backstage, "I'm in love all over again."
21 January 2011
"Graphic abstraction" was Ann Demeulemeester's catchphrase for Spring. The makeup, the hair, the music contributed to a mood that was like silent-movie expressionism: stark and dark. It inspired a strong show whose single-minded message was rammed home by repetition. Demeulemeester claimed the notion of protection defined the collection. So there were buckled breastplates, quilted obis, and funnel collars rearing up over the face, all of them cocooning the body in defensive ways. At the same time, these structured items loaned a sculptural quality that felt new for Demeulemeester. If in the past she has offered flowing, poetic volumes, this collection found power in restraint: the military precision of a fitted jacket and short skirt, the volume of a parka cooped up under a fencing jacket. The designer hiked a skirt high on one thigh and let the rest of it fall to the floor on the other leg, a perfect paradigm for control and release. Quite how that notion translates to the shop floor is a matter for Demeulemeester and her store buyers, but the feel of this collection was definitely tighter and more contemporary, more sci-fi, less neo-medieval.
29 September 2010
An all-white collection of clothes that cleaved close to the body signaled a change on the Ann Demeulemeester catwalk. Gone were the shadowy, poetic layers, replaced by pieces so clinical and precise they wouldn't have looked out of place in a Viennese fencing academy, or on the attendants of an upscale insane asylum (the white breastplates also looked like deconstructed straitjackets). Where there was volume, as in a silken parka or a jacquard coat, it was kept in check by a wide elasticated cummerbund that could probably work Spanx-like wonders on a wayward midriff, as well.The show seemed over in a flash, but while the audience was uncertainly applauding, it started up again, duplicated detail for detail in black, with the cotton of the first course often replaced by leather. "I wanted to see what would happen," said Demeulemeester of the switcheroo. "Things look quite different. It's a different emotion."She was almost right. Of course, white cotton and black leather are scarcely of the same family, but while you might expect the leather to have a dark, vaguely threatening cast, it was extraordinary how sinister the purest white could look as well. It was an intriguing experiment. And we're glad that Ann does these things, so we don't have to.
25 June 2010
From Lanvin's Afrocentric bejeweled finale dresses to Rick Owens' glamorous nuns, tribes have been all the talk at Paris fashion week. Ann Demeulemeester's was particularly fierce, with its red leather, glistening coq feathers, and necklaces of braided whipcord. Perhaps a bit too fierce: Those details looked better and more believable in smaller doses—a red waistcoat, say, peeking out from beneath a black jacket, or plumes decorating the wrists of leather gloves—than they did served full-on (and things did get full-on there toward the end).Demeulemeester chalked up points for experimentation but was much more in her element when it came to the confident tailoring that opened the show. Pants came pleated and full, jackets misbuttoned to create a sense of relaxation. In a season crowded with capes, her strong-shouldered camel version was a standout. And her furs, draped at the neck and tied nonchalantly at the waist, had an offhand kind of luxe that other designers haven't been able to grasp.If you really want to talk tribal, ask one of the initiated about the fetish that has been made of Demeulemeester's boots. This season's skinny sliced wedge looks like a wait list waiting to happen.
5 March 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
22 January 2010
The Ann Demeulemeester show began, as it almost always does, with a passage in black. This time it was tailored, slightly oversize jackets worn with slim cigarette pants topped by leather cummerbunds—no shirts. It wasn't until a few looks in that you could crack her Spring code. Cue the gulls on the soundtrack, the black wing print on a white cord motorcycle jacket, the delicate chains draped from the models' hair bands, and it came to you: caged birds.The nature-versus-man conceit produced one of Demeulemeester's most seductive collections ever. There was a lot of bare skin underneath that moto jacket with lapels made of draped zippers; shrunken leather waistcoats, some without backs, didn't leave much to the imagination, either. The effect was never vulgar, though, thanks to leather bandeaus that covered the bust. Speaking of excesses, the bird prints were certainly plentiful for a designer who made her name in the minimalist nineties. They looked best solo, as on a long evening skirt with a train (worn with a black vest).So, was this Demeulemeester's way of adding to the general conversation about exposure and sex? She'd probably say no. "I always start from an emotional place," she explained. There's little doubt that her fans will connect.
2 October 2009
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
26 June 2009
Last season Ann Demeulemeester lightened up, showing draped and wrapped togas in brilliant shades of orange. Today she returned to her familiar black and white tailoring (Edwardian jackets, narrow trousers tucked into riding boots), albeit with some of the twisting volumes that made her Spring collection such a breath of fresh air.So was this a case of playing it safe? The designer said it was more a matter of balance: the strength of black protecting the fragility of white. That idea came across strongest in a look that combined a softly draped white shirtdress and a stiff black leather brace, the upper straps of which buckled around the torso, while the ones below hung loose. Consider it a Demeulemeester take on a traditional corset. "I wanted something to give women more of a masculine shape," she explained. A tough sell? Maybe not for fans of her brand of androgyny.A more subtle interpretation came in the form of a delicate white poet blouse worn with a black waistcoat and narrow, slouchy pants. Other pieces—like heavy-gauge cardigan capes shaggy with fringe, and jackets layered with little vests embroidered all over with bells that jangled like a suit of armor—may not win her the converts that Spring's little dresses did, but they will be plenty pleasing to Demeulemeester loyalists.
6 March 2009
The power of an Ann Demeulemeester show is that even if you aren't a card-carrying member of her club, there's something in it for you. For Spring, she showed numerous permutations of her signature look: an unstructured jacket cinched at the back, shown this season with a draped and cowled blouse and narrow cropped trousers. The most striking example, though, came not in black and white (the prototypical Demeulemeester palette) but in coral and nude. The relaxed jacket was a few shades lighter than the bunched and undulating top beneath it, and the pants were candy striped in the same unexpected colors.What surprised most about this beautiful collection were the short cotton jersey T-shirt dresses, draped and gathered in a way that evoked both the twenties and tunics. Her liberal use of crystals also felt new. She embroidered them in medallions on vests and softly wrapped dresses or, hitting upon one of the season's recurring themes, strung them like long fringe from the choker collars of high-necked tops. Of course, that was less a case of Demeuelemeester chasing trends than it was a happy coincidence. Happy is the way her audience felt as they left the show.
29 September 2008
Coincidence is a fine, flummoxing thing. Patti Smith loves Hermann Hesse, and on a pilgrimage to the Swiss museum that celebrates his life and art, she saw his carefully preserved clothes. Meanwhile, Ann Demeulemeester, the designer for whom Smith has been a longtimeinspiratrice, was thinking about Hesse'sThe Glass Bead Gameas she sat down to design her new collection. Patti happens to be in Paris, shows up to take pictures in Ann's front row with her vintage Polaroid Land Camera, only to learn the show's all about Hermann. Phew!Demeulemeester's Spring show was set in the garden of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie. It's surrounded by hydrangeas, the flowers that contributed to last season's floral splendors, but this time, Demeulemeester seemed to have retreated to the dark, defrocked-preacher vibe of earlier offerings. There's always gorgeousness in her proposals—here, a doubled jacket, black over white, and a splodge pattern that was her version of an animal print—but one initially hoped for more light in the darkness. Then it arrived in the form of ten elderly men, dressed in shades of ivory and white that contrasted with the funereal tones worn by the young models who had previously trolled the catwalk. The message seemed obvious: The older you are, the closer to the angels you get. After the Etro and Yohji shows, with their jaunty senior citizens, we may be looking at a new fashion trend. (And the third time's the charm.)
27 June 2008
The girls and boys in the Ann gang are slouching into a purplish patch for Fall. It's not far off their beaten path—you'd never expect that—but somewhere along the line, they've picked up an extra layer of mauve ombré-dyed Mongolian lamb, purple-painted shearlings, and maroon-fringed goat hair for winter. Demeulemeester deserves kudos, however, as her crowd never looks as if it's trailing off into Woodstock-slash-boho-rock-'n'-roll-retro costume. She's one of those people whose personal sense of indie cool goes to the bone, and never involves looking back or trying too hard.Things do change by calibrations, though, and this season it was in the proportions created by a wraparound tunic-length top or jacket, and pants tucked into high-laced knee boots. There was still plenty of black and examples of the Demeulemeester cutaway redingote, but they were leavened by a smattering of flower-print and fringed silk jackets. Best, though, was the modernization of this season's by now clichéd seventies chubby—in Demeulemeester's hands it became an asymmetric, high-wrapped cream Mongolian lamb stole with the tips dyed a cool shade of urban grime.
25 February 2008
Every so often, a movie comes along that looks like a dead-cert fashion inspiration. To ardent fans, Todd Haynes's Dylan deconstructionI'm Not Thereseemed like one such. But so far this season, not a glimmer of Dylanophilia, at least until Ann Demeulemeester set her show to multiple versions of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" by everyone from Antony and the Johnsons to Patti Smith (no Ann without Patti) to Bob himself. Backstage, Demeulemeester talked about being inspired by the song's uplifting, positive vibe. In actual fact, it's rather a wearily resigned little ballad, which meant it was perfectly in tune with the Ann of old. A reminder of that Ann was provided by the opener of her latest collection—a scrawny preacher man in a shrunken crow-black suit—but what followed was as uplifting and positive as its inspiration wasn't. She created prints from the blossoms in her own garden, toned them in dusty pink, purples, and lilacs (like the hydrangeas she stuck in hat bands) and cut them into jackets, shirts, pants, and waistcoats. Another print looked like candies. Such uncomplicated sweetness was something new for her.But Demeulemeester's signature proportions—long when you expect short and vice versa—prevailed, though the complicated layering was much lighter than it looked. Technical feats accounted for the feather-lightness of Mongolian lamb coats and jackets (the fleece was sheared and manipulated in artful ways). The same airy movement was duplicated by the fringing spilling from pockets, dripping from hat brims. And the collection's defining piece—a waistcoat with a big crimped collar—acted as a flattering frame for the face. Call it consistency of vision, or whatever you like, but the peculiar beauty of such flourishes has turned Demeulemeester's shows into a high point on the Paris fashion calendar.
18 January 2008
Ann Demeulemeester, to the relief of her many followers, is by nature a trend refusenik. She carved out her aesthetic—that slouchy, layered, definitively Belgian thing—long ago, but still, there's always something subtly permeable about her parameters. This Spring, there's a floppy flowiness to her masculine-feminine design that picks up a sense of the thirties, and plays on bold stripes, fringing, feathers, and languid washed satin.All this, of course, happens within the established template of Demeulemeester's tailoring—monochromatic soft linen coat jackets, elongated vests, and pants. This season, she's worked up a doable translation of a jodhpur and also turned her attention to the new wide-legged satin pajama trouser of the Marlene-gone-modern kind. Something of the glam, playful, and luxurious has even filtered in along the way. There are cock-feather borders on vests, a hint of showgirl razzmatazz in the fringed shorts and flapper shifts, and, if you look very closely among the multiple chains strung around the models' necks, a few transparent lockets filled with crystalline grains that are actually real diamonds—evidence of Demeulemeester's first foray into fine jewelry.
1 October 2007
A scratchy recording of an interview with art provocateur Marcel Duchamp opened Ann Demeulemeester's latest show. It came from an old disc her husband Patrick found in a market in Shanghai. "Wouldn't it be Dada to use this as the music in our next show?"' he wondered to Ann, and that's how the anarchic art movement ended up as her inspiration. But Dada was a subtle presence. The designer imagined an eccentric artist on holiday in the South of France, a man who felt free enough to mix dressing for morning, noon, and nighttime. What this meant in practice was Demeulemeester's favorite male muse—the poetic dreamer—wearing a little more color than usual and trading his customary dark layers for clothes worked in every shade of white. Stripes of red and orange on shirts, jackets, and linings evoked Riviera awnings and freshened up the palette. Jacquards in cotton added a luxe that was lighter than usual.As for the art, a suit's stencil pattern suggested Braque's Cubist period. You're familiar with sleeveless shirts? Ann offered shirtless sleeves ("a remembrance of writers," she cryptically called them). In his interview, renowned dandy Duchamp talked about the durability of the nonconformist spirit. He would have recognized a like-minded soul in Demeulemeester.
29 June 2007
Some might complain that Ann Demeulemeester never changes, but her most ardent fans—arty types who could clock the Kara Walker reference on one of her graphic prints at 20 paces—would argue right back that the naysayers are simply not paying close enough attention. There was a billowy new volume to the hems of jackets and shirts layered over reliably cool trousers, some of them tucked into knee-high boots. Call it a bubble, and a major development for the dark queen of slouch. And those were sequins covering a pair of her signature vests. The collection had even lighter moments, too, like an ivory duster and a white tail coat with contrasting trim, and the models' matching powdered 'dos.But no, Demeulemeester hasn't abandoned black. She used it as a layering device (ribbed knits worn under waistcoats and below floaty tops of tulle) and as an accent (see the oversize lamb mufflers). She knows her way around a shaggy fur, which makes Fall her moment. Of the scores seen on the runways these last few weeks, her vest, longer in front than back, stands out. Why? Years of practice.
26 February 2007
As a reference point for her new man, Ann Demeulemeester imagined Virginia Woolf's Orlando arriving in the twenty-first century and crashing the avant-garde. Who cares about the obtuseness of the inspiration—it resulted in the designer's strongest menswear show to date. By striking a perfect balance between power and vulnerability, she finally realized her oft-stated quest to find the tenderness in the heart of men. The power was plain to see in the graphic palette and the clear definition of her signature layering, helped by white piping that illuminated the all-black tailoring. Where once upon a time there would have been a mass of textures and trailing asymmetry, here there were a couple of jackets layered over each other, with a greatcoat on top. (White shearling? Yes, please!) Add trousers tucked into boots throughout, and the silhouette was radically simplified, but evocative nonetheless.Demeulemeester's models usually look like dreamypoètes maudits. Here they came across as handsome princes. The fairy-tale association didn't end there. A silhouette drawn from an illustrated fantasy customized T-shirts, buttons, and cuff links. Such details catered to the dandy in the Demeulemeester man, but there was much more—a final group gleamed with jet embroidery, the extremity and expense of which was enough to make the designer light-headed when she thought about her production schedule.
27 January 2007
"Ann is my friend. She makes clothes that make me feel like myself. The clothes of my dreams, of my youth." So said Patti Smith, before loping off backstage to think out the improvised voice-over she'd promised as part of Ann Demeulemeester's show. What followed were 20 of those good Demeulemeester minutes in which the idea of running away to be a full-time member of her tousle-haired gang of rock/poet people suddenly seems completely compelling. Call it what you like—a look, a formula, a uniform—there is always some new slant in the layers of dark, slouchy, traily coats, jackets, shirts, pants, and skirts in Demeulemeester's repertoire. As a fashion shortcut to looking elegantly wasted without drugs, it works.For spring, the designer's injection of change was in the flyaway floppiness of cutaway jackets, the fine ticking stripes used for vests, and the way the air-blown, ombré-dyed shirts were loosely tied to bunch at the waist. Underneath, there were leg solutions that, blessedly, did not involve a single pair of leggings. One was a bias-pieced skinny fluted pant; the other, slouchy, wide pants riding low on suspenders. All these were marched out on another great-looking antidote to a trend that has run amok this season: non-platform, wickedly pointy wedge boots with an ankle strap. That gave the models an easy stride, rather than the tottering gait that's been slowing down other runway proceedings, but as the Ann-gang whipped by, the details flashed: pearls strung into spiderweb vests, and assortments of long, metal chains slung as necklaces. Demeulemeester's is a personal universe, to be sure—but it's as authentic and believable as they come.
2 October 2006
"If Rimbaud had lived today, he would have been a rock star," said Ann Demeulemeester after her show. And there's a good chance he would have been a Demeulemeester customer. Her broderie anglaise smock, tied at the side with black ribbon, looked just the ticket for the wild-child poet. And perhaps he'd also have been partial to the black cutaway jacket over the elongated waistcoat and pipestem pants.Spring is now truly the season of the waistcoat—worn underneath a jacket, it's become a heat-wave alternative to the shirt. Demeulemeester showed her waistcoats layered three at a time. Matched with chalk-stripe trousers, there was a formal elegance to the look (the strings of pearls helped, too). Not too formal, mind you. The fact that the clothes were all laundered to the brink of exhaustion meant they were, as the designer put it, "Sophisticated, but in my way."The same mood was present in the short-over-long silhouette: Extravagantly flowing shirttails were bunched by suspenders under jackets of a normal length; a suggestion of lace leggings hung below the hem of cropped trousers. Aside from those pearls, the mannequins dangled feathers, little skulls, and twiglets around their necks, the kinds of things that, according to the designer, a foraging wild child might find in the woods. That might sound like so much poetry, but Demeulemeester's enduring success proves that such waywardly romantic ideas can pack quite a punch, even in a business as bottom-line pragmatic as fashion.
3 July 2006
In a season when so many designers have begun quoting ideas about warrior women, and getting excited about gothic northern layerings, kudos are due to Ann Demeulemeester. She, after all, invented—or rather inhabits—this style. For her, sending out a strong urban female with an elegant-barbaric wardrobe is no passing whim, but a way of life, thoroughly believed in for 20 years.For fall there were no surprises: It looked just as it ever has, with just a few twists to the interpretation. Demeulemeester did black layers, of course, but there were subtleties. She had narrow military cutaway coats and long, asymmetric velvet dresses that trailed sinuously; these ideas, nothing new for her, were right on track with the general direction of fashion at the moment. She added wide pants and metallic leathers that also happen to jibe with current trends. When Demeulemeester put her mind to redefining the long skirt—always a part of her oeuvre, but now a subject of the minute—she came up with a tiny bolero jacket over a narrow, sari-like tube, draped from one shoulder. Excellent—but, then again, hardly a deviation from her continuous line of thought. And that's the cool thing about Demeulemeester: Though she intuits the general shape of fashion in her collection, nothing will ever knock her off the integrity of her course.
27 February 2006
What an irony—the one time Ann Demeulemeester doesn't have a Patti Smith tune on her soundtrack, the singer herself happens to be in Paris and ends up taking to the catwalk for the woman who is her most devoted fan in fashion. Smith's serendipitous presence confirmed this collection as something special for Demeulemeester. Like the message on pins and T-shirts that read "What remains is future," optimism and new energy radiated in the clothes.True, the pale-faced models with their streaming hair still looked like poets manqué in their multilayers of black on black, and the silhouette was still essentially that droopy elongated one that's quintessential Ann. But she had done some serious work on the cut. Jackets had a sinuous cling, reflecting her claim that she wanted to cut life into the clothes to give strength to her fragile boys.As for the palette, it was no longer entirely a case of kill-me-now colors. There was silver leather—in trousers, boots, a double-breasted jacket, a trench. And there were also velvet jackets in rust and deep-purple.A brut alpaca coat and a shaggy gilet, meanwhile, had a pagan glamour—or as the designer herself put it, using a word one might not have expected from her lips: "elegance."
28 January 2006
When editors and buyers walked into Ann Demeulemeester's Boulevard Berthier venue tonight, they were greeted by waiters balancing trayfuls of Champagne. A peace offering after the icy conditions at last season's show? Could be, but any buzz the bubbly stuff provided had dissipated by the time the first look hit the runway, an hour and ten minutes behind schedule.As it turned out, the thirties-flavored gowns Demeulemeester showed in white or black did look as elegant and alluring as a brimming flute. That's not entirely an idle metaphor: Her evening silhouette was almost unfailingly long and narrow on the bottom and frothily layered on the top. Silk halters and tanks provided coverage under crinkly vests, billowy blouses (really just sleeves attached to each other across the shoulders and back), and blatant showpieces made from arrow-thin feathers.The overall effect was frankly rather tricky, especially at a time when women are rediscovering the joy of a little black dress. Luckily, for day she kept things simpler. Bejeweled swags and bibs that hung from the hips or neck almost certainly won't make it into stores, but her full trousers and swaggering jackets will, and that should keep her ardent fans—the kind who wouldn't leave the house in a ruffle—coming back for more.
5 October 2005
The Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning" drifted through sculptor Antoine Bourdelle's sun-dappled studio as Ann Demeulemeester's spring show—her first for men in Paris—got under way. These were clothes for a lazy morning after: Just drag on whatever's closest and layer it up.Demeulemeester described the look as one of "poetic anarchy," perhaps partially referring to the dusty pink color she'd added to her usual monochrome palette. "How can a sculptor wear pink?" she wondered. One might equally wonder how a sculptor would feel in some of the trousers the designer showed, especially the cropped long johns. These were worn with long, droopy jackets (except when they were unnaturally shrunken), and long, droopy tops of varying lengths. A capacious white suit with tie-waisted trousers offered a flicker of elegance among the prevailing languor, and what looked like a pale-blue lab coat also stood out. The outfits for evening—like a shrunken black jacket over an elongated tuxedo shirt—seemed like something Uriah Heep might choose for his next walk down the red carpet.
6 July 2005
Usually, the most direct route to understanding an Ann Demeulemeester collection is to get the T-shirt. This season, she'd printed a cameo of angelic children by the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron on her standard white tank. “I was feeling for something poetic and fragile,” she said. “A bit like Victorian innocence. Beautiful, but contemporary, too.”So that explains how a new, bunchy form bubbled up in the midsection between the textured leathers and solid biker boots Demeulemeester always shows. It was her way of tuning in to the raised waists and pouf skirts of the season for her resolutely alternative audience.The real substance of the collection, though, was in everything else. Taken apart, Demeulemeester's layers speak for themselves. Her military jackets and redingotes in parchment-colored goatskin or ink-dark wool cut an excellent swagger, while her traily, washed-satin under-pieces had a romantic femininity. But most welcome of all were the huge, fiercely glossy scarves, made out of multiple strands of alpaca wound around her models. On a subzero Paris night, that was one idea that had her audience instantly sold.
2 March 2005
At first glance, an Ann Demeulemeester show looks like the homeward march of a tribe of Belgian Goths after yet another lost weekend in an Antwerp club. But in fact, Demeulemeester's business success is thanks to a following, not of club kids, but of women in their thirties and forties.Strange but true: All those pieces—malleable, crunchy paper-light leathers, coolster blazers, asymmetrically traily knits, slouchy pants, and great boots—meld quite happily into the wardrobes of women who've been too busy working and raising children to have been near a basement dive for years. They'll sift through this collection as they always do, finding in it a way to wear color (shades of orange, this time) or adapt a frill to their lifestyle (on a dippy layered skirt, perhaps). The fashion crowd may lose patience with Demeulemeester's measured, skeptical approach to trend—not to mention those persistent dangling straps— but her customers would no doubt be horrified by too much change.It's amazing to realize that Demeulemeester has been designing for almost 20 years; she emerged in Antwerp at the same time as Dries Van Noten, who celebrated his 50th collection with a massive party in Paris this week. Demeulemeester commemorated a personal turning point of her own, in a very different way, for spring: Some of her favorite signature T-shirts were printed with a black-and-white photograph of her son Viktor, who is now 18. "He left home this week to go to art school in Brussels," said the proud mom backstage. Sweet.
6 October 2004
As Ann Demeulemeester's show drew to a close, it seemed the unthinkable was about to happen. The collection, shown to a sweeping, dramatic, classical score, had not a whisper (or, more appropriately, a wail) from the Belgian designer's favorite chanteuse, Patti Smith. But then the orchestra's strings faded—and the opening chords of Smith'sHorsesrang out.Expecting Demeulemeester to abandon Smith would be akin to seeing her show bright, pretty florals: It's just never going to happen. She has laid claim to a dark, gothic sensibility that variously embraces military uniforms, slouchy tailoring, and raw-edged shearlings and furs mixed with tough leathers. The results tend to be of varying returns: sometimes rather wonderful, sometimes not.This collection wasn't far from the former category. The drawbacks were the buckled straps that messily crisscrossed fur vests and dipping asymmetric skirts, and her penchant for partnering her sharp leather or ponyskin biker-style jackets with jodhpurs—surely up there with jumpsuits as one of the worst things a woman can wear. This aside, there was a lot that was good: narrow-shouldered, high-collared coats that buttoned on the side and oversized blousons that were based on the trench, the volume kept under control by their low-slung belts. And there were some wonderful surprises: a flash of silver from chain mail minis layered with big sweaters and tight pants; glossy leather gauntlets whose cuffs were lavished with fur; and a color palette that strayed beyond black to include chestnut brown, soft vanilla, and winter white—the latter at its best in a glazed-leather trenchcoat.
5 March 2004
When the rest of fashion is running in the direction of color, glamour, and lighthearted frilliness, where does a woman who believes in black, androgynous layering, lived-in leather, and symbolic slogans go? She could just keep on walking with sister Ann. Ms. Demeulemeester is not about to renounce a lifetime’s work just because of the season’s dominant trends. On the other hand, Demeulemeester is a sensitive designer who recognizes a change in the air.For summer, she added white to her favorite spectrum of darks, and searched for a way to express the tendency toward shortness and flounce in skirts. One solution had her adding puffy cargo pockets to her favorite hip wraps and coats, letting them trail floppily beneath the hemline. She also made her signature leathers as airy as possible, slashing them with concertina cuts until they were as fine as paper mesh, and layering them among the washed satins and chiffons.As a nod to optimism, she sent out an enlarged rose print (done in black and white) and T-shirts with “’Til Roses” written in mirror-image graffiti. She even forced herself to send out a single outfit in a muted, sanded orange, though she admitted backstage that it had been a struggle. “I searched for a long, long time for this color,” she laughed. “I was afraid it would be too much.”
9 October 2003
On the surface of it, there’s not much change from Ann Demeulemeester for fall. Everything is still black with that lanky, tape-dangling, boot-stomping slouch about it. Demuelemeester’s not about to break into vivid color, crystal strewing or ’60s Cardin references. But then again, who’d want her to?Her strong point of view doesn’t necessarily make her a fashion refusenik. Under cover of all that darkness she’s dealing with the main points of the season in her own way. There are skinny pants laced up the leg, which parallel Christian Dior and Helmut Lang, but she cuts them rocker-style in matte oiled cotton. Fashion’s gone layer crazy for fall, and that’s exactly Demeulemeester's thing. No one knows better how to make a cool assemblage of matte gauze T-shirt dresses, leather leggings, distressed biker jackets, satin hip wraps and pieces of tied-on tailoring seem as if it just happened.The designer has her own dialogue with the subject of menswear-for-women, too. With their black fedoras, big jackets, pants, shirts and ties done in matte crepe, the models looked like Annie Hall’s goth sisters. The collection didn’t flaunt its familiarity with the trends, but that’s precisely Demeulemeester’s appeal: right-on style by stealth, season after season.
7 March 2003
The most compelling designers working now are those who do so out of genuine personal conviction, and Ann Demeulemeester is certainly one of them. She has stayed true to her punk-out Patti Smith vision for 15 years, gathering many faithful followers along the way.To fashion insiders, however, Demeulemeester's onward march seemed samey and relentless this season. Apart from some great silver leathers, the collection showed little awareness of mainstream trends—or even the idea of summer itself, which doesn't exactly cry out for black washed-leather biker coats and pants. Rebel-hearted fans, of course, won't have cared about that, preferring to zoom in on the messages on her T-shirts, which spelled out encouraging words likelife, sinandwilder.And her fans should have been more than happy with the new Demeulemeester accessory, a dangling wraparound leather neck piece, which looked thrillingly like barbed wire.
4 October 2002
Ann Demeulemeester has carved out a separate space in the international design landscape, and populated it with a tribe of her own cool people—men and women who look like proud survivors of the apocalypse. It's a dark vision, but goth is too crude a label to slap on Demeulemeester. Her supple, patinated leathers and drapey layers of luxurious fabrics bound with multiple thick belts have a subtle elegance that transcends lumpen adolescent angst.Like other designers this season, Demeulemeester thought about combat pants, but hers were done in velvet or soft fabric shot with Lurex and tucked into tough, high leather boots wrapped with thongs. Her vests, jackets and floorsweeping coats sprouted savage edges of long-haired shearling on the shoulder or about the neck, like hunting trophies.If the impression Demeuelemeester's design gives is of a group of cave-dwellers, they're a sophisticated bunch with a taste for the trappings of civilization. At night, they wear delicate ivory sequin-scattered dresses, or make an entrance to a clan gathering in a sheer dress with a hood pulled mysteriously over the face. These may be troubled times, Demeulemeester seems to be saying, but that's no excuse to skimp on style.
8 March 2002
Ann Demeulemeester has the rare ability to invest her punky, hard-edged clothes with a lovely, lyrical quality.Slouchy, low-slung trousers and oversize jackets have always been part of the Demeulemeester repertoire, and this season was no exception—done in black and white silk, they looked the epitome of nonchalant chic. Draped dresses, extra-short miniskirts, gathered-neck shirts and wrap shirt-jackets were street-smart rather than girly, cinched carelessly at the hips with multiple-loop belts. Unstructured military jackets, distressed leather coats, and severe ankle boots rounded out the collection.Demeulemeester deftly tackled this season’s layering theme via a series of belts that came with attached half-skirts. Worn over a short dress or skirt, they create a silhouette that is asymmetric, anarchic—and unfailingly cool.
7 October 2001
Ann Demeulemeester's clothes have soul. With a predominantly black aesthetic dominating and practically every designer jumping on the tough-edge bandwagon, her subtle, richly textured designs appear particularly meaningful this season.Case in point: Demeulemeester showed a selection of looks that surely required several courses in engineering to complete, but that still managed to look absolutely effortless on the runway. A jacket billowed out to form a cape in the back but came with faux sleeves stitched to the side—in fact, two hidden slits allowed the arms to escape in case of extreme necessity; a hidden cincture dramatically surfaced in the front, giving the silhouette a seemingly inexplicable pinch. Demeulemeester's loose sweater dresses were gathered with multiple-strand skinny belts; leather jackets sat at the hips, while a monastic high-collar coat nearly grazed the floor.Occasional flashes of color included clouds of dark red on billowy shirts that offered a delicate contrast to the starker looks. A serene, moody soundtrack perfectly complemented the well-thought-out collection.
13 March 2001
Strong women abound for Spring 2001—but few look tougher or sexier than Demeulemeester's chic-punk chicks. Black isn't back for these ready-to-rumble types; it never went away.Metallic band straps literally held together Demeulemeester's collection: Loose blazers were cinched with built-in belts that could be fastened tightly around the waist or left to hang around the hips. Hair pieces were draped over dresses and attached at the neck. And there were several sensational miniskirts made entirely of—what else? —metal snaps, which can be fastened as tightly or loosely as the moment calls for. Demeulemeester rounded off her collection with less aggressive but equally intriguing tie-dyed suede suits and skirts, knit sweaters with wide, loose sleeves and comfortably flared trousers. In short, the urban warrior's modern wardrobe.Ann Demeulemeester proved that she is a designer who can constantly find new ways to reinvent herself; there is always more to her designs than meets the eye.
10 October 2000
It was full speed ahead for Ann Demeulemeester, who successfully revitalized her signature designs while staying true to her well-known style. The mood was decidedly urban and gritty: There were blasted black leather coats with asymmetric skirts, stressed orange suede jackets, aged wool coats and washed black-denim ensembles. Demeulemeester's usually stark color scheme of black and white was livened up by purple military-inspired overcoats, lime-green papery tops, floor-sweeping orange skirts and a glorious sleeveless fur wrap with unfinished edges. Sequined tops, fur mufflers and yellow knit wraps gave a fun, luxurious edge to the great-looking collection.
29 February 2000
The relationship between word and image was the theme for Ann Demeulemeester's predominantly black and white collection. Bands of text with messages like "Curious wishes feathered the air," and "Morning found the field bright" were inscribed on tank tops and jackets. Overlays of transparent tulle, sometimes decorated with subtle beading, covered Demeulemeester's well-known black pantsuits. There were also lighter pieces, like ecru papery jackets, distressed denim pants, and simple knit sweaters.
5 October 1999
One of the original Antwerp Six,Ann Demeulemeesteralready had a cult following for her suits when she presented a dress-focused collection for Spring 1997 that so beautifully combined classicism with asymmetry and nonchalance with elegance, that select pieces ended up in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I wanted to create a new silhouette again,” the Belgian designer said, “because I felt so tired of seeing all these women in close-to-the-body clothes.” She wasn’t the only one. Though Demeulemeester’s retired, her label today is as well known for the slightly askew quality of this signpost show as anything else in her oeuvre.
9 October 1996