Boramy Viguier (Q3937)
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Boramy Viguier is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Boramy Viguier |
Boramy Viguier is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Boramy Viguier has once again decided to show his new collection via the medium of video. His last two short films had a fantastic (and fantastical) mythological/futuristic vibe, distorting reality with a wink-wink to gamer-dom. For spring 2022, he decided to take a simpler approach. Viguier’s models run in the darkness of cyberspace, moving away from some undefined fantasia of a place while heading toward an equally indefinable location.The video’s central conceit, Viguier said via Zoom the other day, is that for all of the movement, his models are essentially running on the spot: Where they’ve left, where they’re going, they never get further or closer. Given our collective experience of recent times, how existence has been essentially a sprint while remaining moored in place, you don’t have to look too far for the allegory to our lives.Yet despite that weightiness, Viguier’s own creativity has clearly not been stuck. He continues to push forward with that idiosyncratic and original fusion of the time-honored tenets of tailored construction and then blows them up by combining them with the design language of athleticwear. It’s where longer-length blazers can nestle under fishtail parkas in optic white or a rich, ornate jacquard woven with a dragon motif. That same lush fabric is also used for the likes of high-collar sporty blousons or short-sleeve shirts, worn fastened all the way up to the neck and partnered with cargo pants.It’s a shimmering, beguiling, essentially optimistic, and joyful statement, confidently navigating a route between decoration and functionality. It also establishes him as a terrific colorist, using gorgeous shades of pink, lilac, scarlet, emerald green, and sky blue, shown to good effect on his djellaba-like tunic shirting. Underscoring his particularly kinetic brand of inventiveness, Viguier has collaborated with Vibram, creating a hiking shoe with the latter’s trek soles; the uppers, meanwhile, are pure Boramy Viguier, riffing on the Japanese art offuroshiki, a folding and knotting of fabric used to wrap gifts.One other idea that Viguier employed for the video: a slo-mo effect where we can see all the richness of detail he has added to the looks—driving gloves; techno-ish versions of cummerbunds; ties with almost every look; and oftentimes ties paired with delicate, almost feminine chokers. The ties are crucial to the collection, Viguier said.
“They’re one of the greatest pieces,” he explained, “one of the most luxurious things in a man’s wardrobe and the most complex to make. Worn with the garments...the look becomes chic, almost Victorian—calculated finesse.”Incidentally, those ties are all vintage. He sourced about 150 of them for the collection, giving them a second life. It underscores his ongoing commitment to using deadstock fabrics (50% with this collection) or whatever he can find within walking distance from his Paris studio. “I don’t know if in the end that’s going to be good for the planet,” Viguier said, “but I do know it’s good for creativity.”
24 June 2021
As we enter the second year of the pandemic—and that must be as awful to read as it was to write—plenty of us are still being challenged to think (and do) anew. Parisian designer Boramy Viguier—whose work mixes up medievalism, mysticism, and modernism into a strange otherworldliness (that’s totally a compliment, BTW)—is proof of this never-knew-you-could-till-you-had-to approach.The new approach, in his case, is filmmaking; in the last six months, Viguier has made two. His first, late last year, was presented as part of GucciFest. His second will showcase his fall 2021 collection, with Viguier codirecting alongside Samuel Rixon. Compare this to the fact that, in the relatively short life span of his label, he’s done one live runway show. Given his enthusiasm for the filmic genre, maybe that show will have been his first and last. I mean, and this is as good a place to mention it as any, Viguier’s penchant for moviemaking doesn’t just extend to his own collections. He’d love to costume design something by his favorite director, Paul Thomas Anderson. I will, as they say, just leave that there.But back to fall 2021, which is called—as is the film that it features in—Resurrection. How’s that for a title rich in symbolism? Resurrection is a dark fable populated with knights, priests, the hoi polloi of a fantasy royal court, and one very Joan of Arc–like heroine (played by French rapper Mona Guba) in all sorts of finery. Finery, incidentally, which is the perfect encapsulation of the more dressed-up approach that menswear seems to be steadily heading in (and which Viguier has proved to be a pretty adept advocate of for several seasons now). For Viguier that means a new idea of a suit, with long lean jackets in jewel-toned velvet or midbrown English gabardine, worn with narrow trousers. By contrast, there are other coats whose ballooning cocoon shapes have a whiff of Cristóbal B about them. His ecclesiastical, clerical tailoring and dog-collar tunic-y tops, meanwhile, come printed with a clash of religious imagery and arcane tarot illustrations.Sometimes, Viguier will bring a sharp sense of today, which keeps everything grounded in reality. Take, for instance, the way he layers up those print pieces under knit pieces he has created in a punkish, DIY way out of deadstock from his own studio and found vintage—or, as he puts it, knitwear “on its way to the bin.
” While Viguier is in the thrall of all of that is Umberto Eco–esque, he also embraces the need to contemporize (and democratize) the metaphysical romanticism. “I want to make myself really comfortable with the art of tailoring being juxtaposed with something really raw,” Viguier says. “To create a sense of kinship with everything—and everyone.”And that’s where Resurrection comes in. Yes, he points out, the word has religious connotations. But the interpretation he’s taking is the sense of optimistically facing the future, no matter how bad things have been. Like many designers who’ve entered the industry in the last few years, Viguier is finding ways to express his wildest and deepest creative impulses with a meaningful commitment to taking responsibility as a designer—in his case, the way he has quietly and un-showily moved upcycling to take center stage at his atelier. “Creatively, all of that traveling, moving internationally [we used to do]...that’s not a good asset,” he says. “What I am doing now...it’s more than local—it’s using what’s in the four walls of my studio. We are all going to have to deal with where we are in a real way very soon. That’s resurrection.”
21 January 2021
You could say that Boramy Viguier is a goblet-half-full kind of guy. The Parisian designer might use a tarot symbol of a medieval drinking vessel as his de facto logo, but he also has a ceaseless optimism when dealing with all and any challenges. Such as: Ever since the confinement in Paris this past spring, Viguier has been creating with whatever fabrics he already had to hand in his studio, printing and embroidering some to create special unique pieces, riffing on that monastic/mystical vibe he draws on so much. It’s his very own version of alchemy, inventively transforming the unused and the neglected through the power of his playful let’s-just-try-it-and-see approach.Most recently, Viguier turned out his first pre-fall, dubbed Lord Sky Dungeon, at breakneck speed. The accompanying trippy supernatural video he filmed just aired as part of GucciFest, Alessandro Michele’s generous turning of the brand’s global spotlight onto emerging talents who deserve the attention. Gucci asked him to take part a couple of months back, and, says Viguier, it took him, “five days to create the collection, four days to film it, and one morning I was asked for the title [of the video] at 10 a.m. and had come up with the name by noon.”The video is a glorious mash-up of everything that Viguier loves cinematically; James Bond title sequences, sword-wielding sorcery epics; cultish horror; et al. (The terrific soundtrack, by the way, is by one of his favorite bands, the L.A.-based Dengue Fever.) Yet the video represents more than cinematic excursion to him; it was also a distinct influence on his creative process for pre-fall. “Every movie I have loved I’ve always loved the costumes as much,” he says, “whether it’s by Scorsese orLord of the Rings. With this collection, I started with the idea of the film first, then designed from there. I’m really interested in continuing to work that way. It brings...a sense of purpose.”That’s evident in the collection’s 21 looks, which distill all of the fable and fantasy that constantly inspires him into some super-wearable and super-desirable pieces. The look rests for the most part on black crew neck sweatshirts, cleric tunic in style, and cut from heavy cotton. (He calls them “the holy shirts.”) These are layered over white collared surplice-like shirting and wide pants. In some ways, it’s the perfect distillation of exactly the kind of approachable/comfortable look we all might have been working this past year.
Yet thanks to Viguier’s own twists, that distinctly ecclesiastical vibe of his, he resolutely makes it his own. There are still a few of those hand-crafted one-offs, notably a drawstring-waisted black coat embellished with those goblets. But Viguier’s pre-fall affords the opportunity to see him strip back his work, taking his signature down to its barest essence. Doing so reveals that Viguier has a whole lot more to say about clothes than his compelling way with myth and fantasy.
24 November 2020
Ever since Boramy Viguier launched his eponymous menswear label in 2018, the Parisian designer has offered clothes with a beguiling and brilliant, mystical-spiritual, medieval bent. There has been a poetic fusion of monastic robing, techno performancewear, and nontraditional tailoring actually constructed in the most traditional of ways; Viguier certainly understands the inner mysteries of what makes a jacket function perfectly. It has all been a little like the sartorial equivalent of Umberto Eco reading the Tarot.Who knows what Signor Eco would have divined about Viguier’s decision to launch a women’s collection for spring 2021, with its compelling and rather terrific mix of shimmering floral coats, Victorian silk shirting, and anoraks printed with the Tarot cups symbol. What’s for sure is that fate certainly played its part in this launch. After all, he’s hardly alone in pursuing new creative leads after months and months of an unexpected lockdown. Perhaps Raf Simons, a designer of a different generation than Viguier, but one who equally sees menswear from unexpected perspectives, felt the same compulsion, given he recently announced that he was launching women’s this October.Still, in this day and age, why are we even talking about gendered labels? Plenty of women are now snapping up Bode New York or Martine Rose. And—let’s gaze into a crystal ball for a second—after their strong offerings for next spring, many more are likely to do so with Priya Ahluwalia or Kenneth Nicholson. Yet Viguier, a sensitive and thoughtful designer, while emphasizing the aesthetic congruence of his different collections, also knows his womenswear requires a mental shift of sorts. “It’s a creative challenge,” he said quite recently during a collection preview. “I wanted to extend my design language, to see what would happen. Though all of these pieces do have a strong connection to menswear construction.”That’s the takeaway here. No one ever wants to see menswear designers thinking they’re speaking to women by giving them what they think are “feminine clothes.” In Viguier’s collection, what looks like skirts or dresses are actually outerwear pieces of different lengths worn atop one another. The rest of the time he partners his pieces with a niftily cut cargo-style pant near identical to the one he does for men, and it’s to be presumed that it’s intended to be worn with everything here.
Ultimately what unifies his men’s and his women’s is the way they draw on the same font of a particularly idiosyncratic and heartfelt notion of minimalism—a minimalism which has thus far been playing throughout so much of what’s going to be on offer for next spring.
30 September 2020
“What really interests me about fashion is discipline, [yet] we always think it demands a lot of freedom.” Boramy Viguier, the young Parisian menswear designer, was talking via Zoom a week before the spring 2021 men’s shows were due to hit the internet, zigzagging back and forth from screen to sample rack to screen, holding pieces up for virtual inspection. “But it is a discipline that demands a lot of rigorous behavior. I love to be with the factory, with the technicians, almost like a discipline. The making of a garment is being rigorous fromAtoZ.I love this discipline because it is really about creativity.”Like almost everyone else in the entire world, Viguier has found his life—creative, business, and otherwise—dramatically, cataclysmically upended these past few months. His new collection was conceived and produced entirely during lockdown. But if the results are anything to go by, confinement was only a physical state for him. Take his terrific black croc-stamped vinyl coat, for instance, which was one of many plays on volume in this collection, some of it alluding to religious and medieval dress (the coat’s right cuff patched with a mystical icon). Or consider the aqua and lilac sweater vests, seamed and stitched together to create something both noble and raw, an echo of having to search for beauty at a time when it feels almost entirely absent. Clearly Viguier’s imagination was as boundless as ever, something underscored by the incredible set of images—part William Gibson, part Denis Villeneuve—that he created to showcase his work, quite easily the best of this (digital) season thus far. (Though still, truthfully, previewing this collection virtually made you long for Zoom HD. Or maybe I just need stronger glasses.)Those vests started out as a pile of sweaters in Viguier’s atelier, and they’re now part of a new series of garments that he constructed from whatever was to hand; there are also protection vests made out of a stock of vinyl he had, wadded with scraps of leftover fabrics. All these pieces will be offered to buyers as one-offs, each with a label giving details of the garment in French, English, Arabic, and Khmer (his mother is from Cambodia). You could say these are all literal renderings of past lives, something that has cropped up in his work since he launched his own label two years ago after a spell at Lanvin. You could also say that they are exactly what would make any one of us shop now; the soulful quotient here is high.
In lockdown, Viguier fused together all sorts of things that might not seem like they really belong: technical athleticwear with Tarot divination; the mysteries of faith with a relentless and sometimes disturbing futurism. He rocked those here to considerable effect, with a romantic floral layering of satin and organza cut into a duster coat, or used for a crossbody utility bag, strapped across a poetic white tunic. Both looks—like all of the looks here—were styled with white lace veils daubed in red. Unsettling, to be sure, but also visually hypnotic. If a designer is going to take their own leap of faith at a time when the industry is harder than ever, make it magical, and make it mesmerizing.
10 July 2020