Lutz Huelle (Q3238)
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Lutz Huelle is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Lutz Huelle |
Lutz Huelle is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Lutz Huelle’s spring show took place at the INHA, the library of the Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art—a venue worthy of winning the award for The Most Stunning Location of Paris Fashion Week. Huelle also deserves recognition for presenting one of the most delightfully clever and inventive collections of the week, proving that, despite a limited budget, with good ideas, a skillful handling of the métier and a sense of humor, you can deliver a knockout show.The wood-paneled library of the INHA is housed in the grand Salle Labrouste, a 19th-century marvel. To grasp its magnitude, it holds 1,800 manuscripts, 20,000 rare books, 30,000 prints, and 45,000 autographs. “When you consider that books have been burned or banned in some parts of the world, the fact that this place was built to safeguard and share knowledge is truly amazing,” Huelle remarked. Its frescoed high ceilings are topped by domes “round and ample like crinolines,” that apparently inspired the architecture. “There’s an echo of fashion here,” Huelle noted. “Everything we create builds on what came before us. If you consider how much progress is represented in this space—and fashion is progress, always evolving, always at the forefront of who we are.”Huelle’s inspiration for the collection sparked when he spotted a couple on the street, dressed in formal wear—the man in a sharp suit, the woman in a flowing evening gown. This encounter made him contemplate the gap between these two wardrobe archetypes, and explore how he could gradually transform a traditional blazer-and-trousers ensemble into a dress suitable for special occasions.To do so, he played a sort of cut-and-paste charade, where he started slicing off a suit at the waist, using the bottom part as a skirt. From there he went inventive, reworking and assembling wardrobe staples and trimmings—a crisp tuxedo shirt (accordion-pleated at the waist and made into a bustier), an oversized bomber (the front was cut out and lined with lace exposing its layers), and lengths of lace ribbons (left dangling from a cotton T-shirt, attached on the waist of a blazer, or trailing behind a satin dress). One of the standout pieces was a silver and black jacquard evening bustier top stitched to a men’s white poplin shirt—it practically begged to be part of your wardrobe. Equally attractive was a voluminous duchesse opera coat, featuring horizontally-pleated pagoda sleeves, replicating the vertically-pleated bib of a tuxedo shirt.
Huelle wears his remarkable creativity and skills with such levity, it feels almost ridiculously effortless—you could imagine him cleverly crafting an entire collection from a simple white T-shirt in no time, and with no pretense.
30 September 2024
Is Lutz Huelle Paris’s most underrated designer? Seeing him back on the runway after a four-year gap, the thought came to mind. The deconstructed vintage jeans Huelle rehabs into hybridized trousers were trending all over town this week. Designers must know a good idea when they see one. He makes the “real clothes” that everyone is talking about this season with not much in the way of resources but quite a lot in the way of creative aplomb, and he’s been doing so for years.For a refresher, Huelle hails from the Martin Margiela school of fashion. Having worked with the Belgian designer for three years, he picked up not just a taste for old clothes to manipulate into something new, but also a flair for turning the familiar into the less so. As of last season, he hadn’t been planning on returning to the show schedule, but AZ Factory, the Richemont brand founded by the late Alber Elbaz where he’s now designing pre-season collections, offered its support, and he couldn’t say no.The show at the Cathédrale Américaine on the Avenue Georges V was intimate by Paris standards. Huelle’s lifelong friend Wolfgang Tillmans was in the crowd, along with some of his regulars. The return to the runway didn’t mean a shakeup of Huelle’s formula; used Levi’s were still the foundation. This time, he spliced the collars and cuffs with cotton drill for a trench and quilted nylon for a lightweight winter coat, and on pants he mashed up denim with pinstripes and a Prince of Wales plaid. Tweaking the classic bib-front tuxedo shirt, pintucked pleats were turned on their axis so they ran horizontally across the chest, or else he replaced vertical pleats with inset sequins.You can depend on Huelle for a statement coat or jacket. His patchwork MA-1s were back in various combinations of pinstripes, nylon quilting, and wool felt, and he inset vintage blazers with bands of sequins around the waist. Raincoats, meanwhile, were reconstructed with pleated panels that gave them the swishy feeling of a dress. Smart money says invest in one now before the rest of Paris fashion catches onto this idea too.
4 March 2024
Lutz Huelle’s studio is down a cobbled Marais alley lush with greenery that feels like magic to a New Yorker. It’s a Paris Fashion Week hideaway where you can find a sweet going-out top (it will often involve sequins) and see what he’s gotten up to with upcycled denim.After years of running his independent business out of the space, Huelle has to vacate—his operation has gotten too big. Though he doesn’t make the kind of noise that his Parisian compatriots are prone to—there hasn’t been a Lutz runway show since the start of the pandemic and he doesn’t talk about going back—he’s got a growing business, and a repeat customer on his online store.For the last few seasons they’ve been loving the way he puts taffeta sleeves on a cotton jersey t-shirt, or pairs a voluminous taffeta trapeze top with pleat-front chinos. (The odd combination is something he picked up from his former boss Martin Margiela.) But he felt he’d come to an end of a cycle, so he shelved the taffeta for the moment, and started off the new season by iterating on the tuxedo shirt, adding silver foil to the front, extending the hem below the hip so it can double as a dress, twisting the bib pleats on their side.The idea was to make a formal garment feel fresh and new. He did the same kind of iterative experimentation with the boxy tweed jacket—a most classic French garment—by splicing in upcycled denim at the front placket, shoulder seams, hem, and cuffs. It’s a high-low mash-up and a guaranteed best-seller on his e-commerce site, not just in tweed, but also in black sequins or black duchesse. In one corner of the studio there are stacks and stacks of used jeans, sourced at Paris’s vintage markets. This season he’s adding gold foil to the waistbands—disco jeans!“I’ve been around the block once or twice,” he said, nodding to his about-to-be-former space. “It’s taken a bit longer for me, but I’ve always just done what I like.”
1 October 2023
In a season of pantsuits, Lutz Huelle is a name to know. With his Martin Margiela training, Huelle designs for the street, not the runway, and he specializes in the kind of elevating details that raise clothes above the everyday. Take sequins. He put silver sequins on the underside of the lapels on a double-breasted black suit, so that when the collar is popped, there’s a flash of shine. But if embellishment is essential to his aesthetic, simplicity is built into his iterative design process.For spring Huelle made a vest with a simple square of fabric cut with two holes for the arms. He liked the slouched-on effect so well that he adapted the pattern to jackets and coats for fall. They have a similar ease. Soft drapes of fabric fold down the front, or a corner can be tucked through a slit in the opposite one to gather the material with a zhuzh at the throat. With collections that build on each other, there’s a lot of built-in versatility in what Huelle does.His experiments with denim continued apace too. On jeans, he sliced the pant legs vertically down the front to evoke the creases his mother’s ironing made on his childhood jeans; added wide stripes of sequins to the side seams; and had fun with silver paint, “foiling” the top few inches of an upcycled pair and transforming them into party pants in the process. The jean jackets received more thorough transformations, including one deconstructed and reconstructed horizontally to create a dramatic funnel neckline. The neckline was a focal point for Huelle this season, with button-downs that buttoned down the shoulder seam or were worn sexily back to front.Other independent designers are struggling in this difficult economy, but Huelle reports his business has been heating up. That’s another reason to pay attention to him. As viral fashion comes into question and runway stunts start to feel passé, he’s a founding member of the slow-burn school of fashion.
5 March 2023
Why do some things stay in fashion and others don’t? What’s the It factor that makes you want to wear a top, a dress, a jacket over and over? Lutz Huelle has been thinking on those subjects. He is what you might call a small-batch designer, iterating on his silhouettes and selling them mostly DTC through his website, where the instant feedback helps inform what he does next.When he’s got a hit, he knows it, because determined shoppers will email or DM for more. And vice versa—he also sees pieces go ignored. For spring he decided he’d try digging into the vice versa situation. “There are things that I like, but that I could’ve done better or didn’t sell that well,” he explained.An off-the-shoulder, pouf-sleeve taffeta top was one of those things. The original, he felt, didn’t have enough pouf, so he added more volume at the top of the sleeves and also cut it as a coat and a cropped jacket. Poufs reappear throughout the collection, including on the sleeves of a black jersey crop top, a piece he once might have sworn off but for the above-mentioned attention he’s been paying to what people seem to be wearing over and over. Huelle, to be clear, is no trend-oriented designer. His aesthetic is too well honed for that.There were also new versions of big sellers. A sleeveless jacket with gold sequined lapels sold out last season, so he remade it with black sequins for a subtler look. That, in turn, inspired a waistcoat in men’s suiting fabric, which he spliced at the midriff with a used denim jacket, as well as a longer version that can double as a minidress with sequined biker shorts underneath. Sequins were another through line in the collection, also turning up as a horizontal stripe across his upcycled denim jackets and as tuxedo stripes down the outside of his jeans, which he spliced together from two used pairs. “The stripes curve around at the hips, which give you a really nice shape,” he saidWatching Huelle work his way down the rack, learning how one piece begets another, is a lesson in how to put simple pieces together to make a look that feels new. If he were to put videos of that process on his DTC website and Instagram, he’s bound to sell even more.
1 October 2022
Had Omicron not intervened, this Lutz Huelle collection would’ve been more extravagant than it is. The last two seasons have been successful ones for Huelle. The pandemic notwithstanding, he’s grown his e-commerce business and his wholesale sell-throughs. That’s down to the charming way he’s infused whimsy and eccentricity into pieces that wear like everyday essentials: T-shirts and polos with shocking pink couture poufs, jeans spliced together from multiple pairs in different washes, and nylon MA-1s with wool inserts and collars. Instinctively, he wanted to double down on the special details that have elevated his recent basics. But facing the same supply chain issues as other independent designers, he was forced to do more with less for fall.And so the polyester taffeta that gave his spring collection so much of its verve was reserved for ruffled collars on simple button-down shirts and puffy shoulder inserts on jersey turtlenecks. Taking simplicity a step further, he made shrugged-on gilets from single squares of fabric cut with two armholes, and constructed dresses from two squares of fabric sewn together. The seam allowances on the dresses created ruffles that extended from neckline to hem for results that were both minimal and maximal at once. In a nutshell, that’s the kind of fashion Huelle specializes in, osmosed, maybe, from his years working for Martin Margiela. Make that low stress, high impact clothes with the versatility to work for all genders. To prove his point, he pulled an opera coat off the rack and tried it on over his diagonally spliced two-tone Lutz jeans—a perfect fit.
4 March 2022
“It’s all about going out.” That was Lutz Huelle in his Marais studio today, talking about his spring direction, but this isn’t a collection of little black dresses or any other kind of conventional party clothes. Huelle doesn’t really do conventional. Instead, he magicks together jackets from used denim and army surplus, and splices cargo pants and jeans. The attitude is everyday, because, though his patterns are complex, they aren’t complicated. “If there’s one thing I don’t want anymore, it’s complication,” he said. But after 18 months of pandemic, Huelle knows most of us are over staying in. He definitely is.The collection’s starting point was a checked cotton shirtdress with a sequined neckline. He liked the surprise of the sequins on the humble fabric and quotidian shape, so he added them elsewhere: to the collars and edges of jean jackets and hoodies, and to the underside of the lapels on a boxy men’s vest and an oversized double-breasted blazer that put you in mind of his old boss Martin Margiela. T-shirts and tanks were the subjects of his next experiment. These he zhuzhed with couture-ish bubbles of pink, or royal blue, or black silk taffeta at the hem, etvoila, going-out tops with the ease we aren’t quite ready to let go of yet, even if we are on the hunt for a good time.Back to the topic of LBDs: There’s a first time for everything, including a clingy jersey tube-dress with voluminous ruffle cuffs and the name Lutz Huelle on the label. A few guys appear in the lookbook—that’s new, too. “It’s about seeing masculinity in a new way,” Huelle said. Including in pink taffeta.
1 October 2021
“I am fed up with not dressing properly, staying at home and putting something nice on top, not making an effort,” begins Lutz Huelle over Zoom. “The novelty has worn off.” Instead of wallowing, Huelle wants to find a positive way forward. He says his fall 2021 collection is about finding the pleasure in getting dressed again.Huelle’s version of joyous dress-up isn’t the corset boning and strasse of other French brands. He’s too kind to our bodies for that sort of stuff. Instead, he has taken what he learned from his spring 2021 season of pajama dressing and injected those ideas into ready-to-wear. A sweatshirt midi-dress with a giant taffeta ruffle at its hem is Huelle’s thesis in a look: something that can be for home or cocktails, black, anonymous, and over-the-top at once. A sapphire brocade is cut into an oversized baseball jacket; purple taffeta wraps into an evening top worn with a vermilion pleated skirt; and a bright pastel pink men’s shirt is lengthened to the ankle and belted—an item somewhere between a robe, a dress, and a jacket. Huelle has topped all this off with true chandelier earrings: long metal chains that end with a single crystal.His most genius decision of fall 2021, though, was the complete elimination of waistbands. Every piece has a tie waist—including the upcycled jeans—to allow for comfortable adjustments to size and fit. The most exciting use is in a nylon bomber jacket, where Huelle cut off all the ribbing at the collar and hem, spliced it horizontally, and inserted a ribbon belt. It’s as elegant as an opera coat, but as durable as a piece of workwear. Other ingenious twists include wool Fair Isle cardigans with insertable nylon plackets (global warming has rendered big-wool-sweater season too short, thus the cardigan) and a halter top he cut from an old T-shirt, which he shows off how to make in his collection video.“It’s probably my least conceptual collection,” he says. That’s not a bad thing. Toward the end of our call, Huelle stresses that if women don’t wear his clothes, if they don’t have a life beyond the look book, he considers it a failure. Judged that way, this season is likely to be a success.
5 March 2021
Even for the eternal optimist Lutz Huelle, the pandemic and lockdown proved difficult. Now seven months after the initial closures in Paris, the smile has returned to Huelle’s visage. He’s beaming over a FaceTime call, but admits that for those first couple months, he couldn’t muster even getting out of bed, let alone thinking about designing a garment. As restrictions eased, he was among the first to return to his studio, posting cut-up and reconstructed tees on his Instagram. Even in these bleak times, creativity plods on. He would design spring 2021, he thought. “It only became clear once I just looked at what was closest to me: what people were wearing at home,” he said.The collection is titled “Le Pyjama Rose”—the pink pajama—and grounded in a silken PJ set in a totally Lutz shade of electric pink. “It’s just a pajama, it’s ridiculous!” he said, sort of laughing. But when worn by Mutsue, a model in Paris, with blown-out hair and a single crystal earring, he says, “It’s sort of Donna Summer. A sensual pajama.” (Summer is proving the unofficial muse of the season, appearing on the soundtrack at both Rick Owens and Isabel Marant.)Mutsue, alongside the other models in Huelle’s look book—the actor Kate Moran, the former Lacroix muse Sylvie Gueguen among them—styled themselves in the clothing. No rules! Wear what you like! Morgan opens the look book in a voluminous black taffeta off-the-shoulder top with white board shorts. Later, she pairs a tiered denim skirt with a collared white shirt, easily the most “going out” look in this relaxed collection. Kadiata, another model, wears a rose wrap top with gigantic pouf sleeves over marigold shorts, later styling a gray sweatshirt with a taffeta ruffled hem over a bright green printed skirt.As Huelle pulls out the items from a rack in his showroom, his smile only beams brighter. These are the simplest of garments—tee, sweat, skirt, cinched jean jacket—rendered special with poufs, frills, and his electric palette. “You don’t feel you’ve let go of everything. If there’s one thing we can’t do right now is give up,” he says. “There is a message: Feel good about yourself.”
2 October 2020
Wardrobe dressing has gotten a pretty blasé rap as far as fashion concepts go. So many designers have started to use the term as a crutch to level the playing field between neutral-toned blazers and black dress pants that it has begun to mean nothing at all. But for Lutz Huelle, the idea of building a wardrobe has a very distinct and finite definition: A wardrobe is comprised of the garments you go back to again and again, the pieces that become your absolute favorites. After six years at the helm of his own brand, Huelle is looking back on his own favorites, rethinking the items that he sees as the core of a woman’s wardrobe for fall 2020.Those items existed as part of a dialogue, with the bulk of the collection consisting of separates. Yes, there were a few dresses, but they lacked the oomph of Huelle’s clever, fully styled-out looks. A raglan-sleeve jacket, in shocking pink, came with matching straight-leg trousers and a pleated tunic. An upcycled denim skirt with its pockets askew was paired with a black raised-shoulder jacket. T-shirts were built with deep-V sequins to layer under mannish blazers, and a bomber jacket was fused together with a classic wool coat in black. Together, these clothes make outfits, and altogether these outfits looked like an unperturbed and smart way to dress. Huelle accessorized each item with bourgeois pearls or dangling earrings, a nod to one of the last great cultures of wardrobing tropes, finishing off his women with block heels and golden makeup. In total, Huelle’s vision works. He might have played “You’re So Vain” on the soundtrack, but the clothes he showed prove that he’s willing to think outside himself—and for his customer—this season.
28 February 2020
Lutz Huelle’s new Spring collection is his love letter to Paris. Backstage, he explained that he’s lived here for 20 years and that it’s taken that long for him to be inspired by the fashion of the city. “I always found it old fashioned, for me it was too controlled,” he said. “But I came back from holidays recently feeling like this place is actually amazing. It feels like a sanctuary, especially considering what else is going on in the world.”Huelle’s work changes by degrees, but here there were discernible differences from recent seasons. A surfeit of polka dots, a bourgeois black-and-white plaid, a metallic floral lamé. Those aren’t fabrics he would’ve cottoned to in the past; he would’ve found them in too “good taste.” Naturally, he treated them in unexpected ways; the tulle polka dots, for example, were cut into a sheer skirt layered over a long poplin shirt or worn as pants under a trapeze dress. The other way he got at his Paris theme was to take a typically French silhouette like the skirt suit and give it the Lutz treatment. There were two here cut in floral jacquard; on top were baseball jackets, cut blouson style over equally full skirts.The hybridized outerwear that’s become such an important part of Huelle’s repertoire didn’t necessarily jibe with the nostalgia of the rest of the collection, but it’s hard to let go of your biggest sellers. And so he didn’t. In one case, he stripped jean vests of their yokes and spliced in ruffled netting, giving them a more polished feel than usual. In another case, he combined jean jackets with trench coats. They looked great. You can’t take the German deconstructionist out of this Parisian.
27 September 2019
Lutz Huelle was appointed creative director of Delpozo, the Madrid-based demi-couture house, in December. It has meant more plane travel than usual for Huelle, and he said it had him thinking about the clothes we wear in airports. If that’s giving you visions of tracksuits and flip-flops, think again. The designer believes in dressing up for the most mundane of occasions—not only for TSA precheck. How to make the everyday elegant and vice versa—“using clothes to please yourself,” is how he describes it—has become the ongoing project for this former right hand of Martin Margiela. Huelle has done it in captivating ways of late, splicing lace insets into jean jackets and silk florals into army surplus.The difference this season is that his atelier experience at Delpozo is elevating the goings-on here. There was no denim, to start with. Backstage, he pointed out a hoodie . . . in silver and turquoise silk jacquard. “People won’t stop wearing the damn things, so I thought I’d do it my way,” he said. He used the same metallic jacquard for his first-ever long skirts, cut straight, then blossoming out south of the knees. Pants were cut in couture-ish fabrics, but with the easy, gathered waistbands of sweats—glamleisure. Huelle’s jacket of the season is a bomber-cape hybrid, “basically a blanket,” but chic, especially in the navy and red combination accompanied by red satin boots.It’s a clever thing Huelle is doing here. Glamour is the backdrop and buzzword of this new fashion moment. But the truth is that most of us have grown very comfortable in our stretchy yoga clothes. Merging the two attitudes has the potential to turn on a lot of women.
2 March 2019
Lutz Huelle is an industry veteran with shallow pockets. Those are two points against him in a business obsessed with youth and euro signs. That means his collections often go underappreciated, which is a shame. It’s not an exaggeration to say he’s making some of the coolest jackets and coats in fashion right now.Outerwear hybrids are everywhere at the moment. Designers have adopted a more-is-more ethos, and no combo is too unlikely, which makes much of what we see coming down the runways highly unlikely to connect in the real world. Huelle’s splicing and dicing works because it’s subtle. A jean jacket inset with triangles of lace that gave a gentle hourglass shape to the waist retained its everyday jeans-iness. Ditto an army green bomber inset with a red-on-black rose print. Paired with a tea dress in that floral print, the jacket looked elegant, but it would also be believable and winning with weekend athleisure.Elegance was something Huelle said he was interested in exploring this season. He showed us coats in animal spots or lamé brocade with couture-ish bell-shaped sleeves. Those coats had a nice sense of drama, but his sweet spot is really at the intersection of elegance and the everyday.
8 October 2018
Lutz Huelle had an emotional time looking around the Martin Margiela retrospective which opened at the Musée Galliera the other day. It reminded him most strongly of how his onetime boss “saw beauty in everything. Nothing was insignificant or without the potential for beauty, even a stupid plastic bag.” Huelle’s work doesn’t appear to be visibly influenced by Margiela, but he does seem on a mission to make ordinary life a little more enjoyable. In this collection, he interrupted some banal, generic clothes by inserting patches of rich brocade or traditional wool into them, thus knocking their volumes off center. Regular parkas and a jean jacket became wrap-over shapes. The internal padded quilting of coat liners came to the surface and was fused with knitwear or a denim shirt.Plenty of designers these days have turned to patch-working garments together; what makes Lutz stand apart is that the results are not just for the look—they’re resolved into wearable garments with a French nonchalance about them. With his offering of gilded brocade narrow pants, you could imagine these clothes being the kind of thing you see young Parisian girls wearing in cafés and bars. As we know: They never overdress, but they always wear the right thing.
3 March 2018
The termstreetwearhas acquired a lot of routine, humdrum associations since it ended up becoming synonymous with hoodies, sweatpants, and trainers. Lutz Huelle, however, is pushing dressing for the street quite another way—his collections elevate practical, weather-resistant clothes to the level of elegance. “I wanted something imposing and exaggerated, but to work out how to wear it to go vegetable shopping or whatever,” he said. “I asked myself how to make clothes for every occasion, but not in the sense of red carpet occasionwear.”The result, shown in the semi-outdoors, under the colonnade of the Paris bourse, was a collection which smartly balanced couture references with a sense of the cool. After working on shoulder lines in a show positively reviewed by Vogue Runway’s Nicole Phelps, Huelle said he wanted to push volume downwards this time. He ended up with a jacket shape that had wide, flounced sleeves, which inevitably echoed Cristóbal Balenciaga—as did the cocoon-y “bomber” later on—but he made certain to style them in a manner not limited to evening. “It’s actually really practical, weatherproof mackintosh material,” he said of the opening jacket. “The rain would splash off the sleeves!”If there was something familiar about Huelle’s capturing of street elegance, maybe it’s because he used to work for Martin Margiela, the man. Something about his casting, and the minimal strands of crystal earrings worn by an interesting, mixed-age group of women had that vibe. Lutz as a brand doesn’t aim to be highbrow deconstructionist, but Huelle’s discipline is to make something which is concise and useful out of not very much—a balance of soft, plissé tunic dresses, cut to swirl in motion, worn over narrow pants, and a strong series of outerwear, skillfully patch-worked in denim, lace, brocade, and utility quilting.Like so many others this season, Huelle worked on the trenchcoat—itself a classic Margiela subject. The best Lutz version was a fusion of tan raincoat and silver-and-black brocade with matching narrow trousers, which came off as a modern suit. The enthusiasm of his audience—which practically tipped over the steps of the bourse—attested to Huelle’s cult status among a European crowd. It’s about time his work was picked up more widely.
29 September 2017
A friend recently posted a photo of a young Martin Margiela on his Instagram account with the caption #Margiela Everywhere #Martin Nowhere, the point being that about eight years after the Belgian designer’s retirement, his influence is more widely felt than ever. Lutz Huelle worked for the man himself, so if you see Margiela’s imprint here, that’s why.Huelle’s new collection picked up where his Spring show left off. Silhouette-wise, the shoulder was still the thing, only this time more so. Folded, rolled, poufed—he had this writer right up until the end, when the exaggerated shoulder met the exaggerated sleeve, and the proportions erred too wide. Huelle gave the hybridized outerwear he did last season another go around, too. It looked right then, and it looks right now, whether he combined askew jean jackets and bright fur to the knees or an MA-1 jacket in blue with red flannel. Puffers promise to be a popular sight again next Fall. Anybody shopping for an uncommon one should consider Huelle’s, which are slender where those of other designers are boxy, and come combined with denim, houndstooth, and even a Fair Isle sweater—clever. Bicep-high gloves with spangles at the wrist gave a polished, elegant look to a jean jacket and a pair of short dresses with slices up the insides of the sleeves. Huelle’s show drew a small cadre of influential editors, but it’s mostly off-the-radar of the international crowd, even with the Margiela connection; they missed a good one this season.
3 March 2017
Several people had brought their small children along toLutz Huelle’s Spring show, which may have been more of a reflection of the hour (6:30 p.m.) than the content or scope of the collection. The setting—YOYO at Palais de Tokyo, looking something like a black-lit basement—didn’t particularly lend itself to young kids, but then again, there was a certain eye-catching element (strong shapes! bright colors!) sure to entertain the littlest members of the audience.The silhouette was strong-shouldered and squared-off. Some deconstructed shirting in white and black stood out to audience members, but the big news here was the furthering of previous seasons’ trompe l’oeil layered denim. There was a new Eastern influence that came through, most notably in the kimono-style wrapped jackets, or the mandarin collar of a camouflage topper piped in fuchsia. If the Asian inflections were lost on the audience’s younger members, they might have been drawn to Huelle’s color palette, which seemed to originate from the Crayola box.
30 September 2016
Lutz Huelle, a line that guns for visual intrigue through “awkwardness” (as written in aTumblr-published manifestofrom February), aims to dress real people — as complex and multifaceted and unpredictable as they may be. This typically comes through in what Huelle has described as his “unreadable” designs, which can produce a problem for those employed to do the reading. But no matter: For Fall 2016, Huelle decided to go big, attempting to “add volume to the body without oversizing it.” This translated into a tailored camel coat and sleeveless vest with front panels tripled in size, denim jackets that went from single breasted to “triple-breasted” courtesy of additional sweeping fabric panels, and Huelle’s bomber jacket (“my beloved bombers”), which—with contrasting panels and finishings in double wool—seemed closer to a trench coat. It was, in a month that has been saturated in both bomber jackets and camel coats, both on the runways and the streets outside them, extremely clever and not at all too tricky to imagine fitting into a fashionable wardrobe.Denim was combined with crepe and gold sequins. Open zip-front skirts in light wool, pinstripe, and denim acted as belts, cinching the models’ waists. Those same skirts, later iterations crafted out of transparent plastic, became a kicky protective shield for the dresses or pants under them, which sounds a little nuts until you consider that the weather in Paris every day this week has ricocheted between sunshine, hail, and something close to a monsoon. Unreadable, maybe, but very clever indeed.
4 March 2016
To hear Lutz Huelle speak about his clothes is to be on the receiving end of all sorts of mini revelations. To wit: “I like that something appears sexy because the person inside it decides it is going to be sexy.” The supporting evidence: a trench coat or gray jersey tunic that could be unzipped from the shoulder down the arm. Or else he’ll consider how a garment might exist in a fixed seductive state of sliding off the body; this he did by suspending the core of black parka from diamanté straps, flipping its raison d’être from outerwear to evening attire. Huelle operates from the premise that his designs need to end up being worn; otherwise, as he puts it, “What’s the point?” But his application of elasticized seaming to alter volumes, or the flapper fringing spilling forth from a boxy blazer also backed up his belief in “eccentric simplicity.”There were other indications throughout the Spring collection that this under-the-radar Paris-based designer studies construction without overthinking it. A dress pleated from neckline to hemline was bookended with circular denim sleeves; the result was slouchy yet flattering. If the pliant mesh—akin to citrus-fruit netting—seemed less essential than other pieces, it also layered the looks with unexpected edge. Speaking of unexpected, Huelle arrived at his final looks by accident upon realizing that the sheer perimeter of an embroidered sample made for a dynamic overleaf. He loved the idea so much that he tacked an oversize square of black silk onto the front of a white T-shirt dress. How easy, how right.
12 October 2015