Holiday Boileau (Q4288)
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Holiday Boileau is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Holiday Boileau |
Holiday Boileau is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
When Gauthier Borsarello starts mulling over a new season, he always starts by wearing vintage for a spell. To wit: For this particular showroom visit he was sporting an old red felt jacket plastered with Boy Scout patches. “Now, I know the armholes need to come down a notch,” he offered. Still, this is the kind of piece he loves, ferrets out, and recasts anew in favorite fabrics with details like real brass buttons that take on the patina of time.Holiday Boileau’s base, as he describes it, is “big sister” types who have it all together and “little brother” guys with bad-boy bourgeois leanings. For fall, the collection is filtered through a very specific prism: the legendary couple Françoise Hardy and Jacques Dutronc, in England, in the late ’60s. VintageHolidaymagazine covers of the couple and their music sparked that idea; another featuring a young Queen Elizabeth II is replicated on a meaty T-shirt. English textiles and tweed in particular get full play. Pants are slightly flared or straight and fluid with a break at the ankle; sleek jeans have a 69 etched on the back pocket. Sweaters get a deep V, the better to leave open a few extra buttons on the shirt underneath, and perhaps a dark floral that nods to ’70s rock-and-roll sexiness.For a Barbour-style coat, Borsarello took cues from his own, transposing checks from the lining to the outside. A duffle coat appears minus the hood. Womenswear follows the same train of thought, with supple tweed jackets in pale pink or navy, and mink jackets that look for all the world like the real thing but are, in fact, done in faux fur made from recycled plastic bottles and fishing line.Borsarello and Franck Durand, the mastermind behind Holiday Boileau, consider the brand to be less about fashion than a journey through time and space. “The main goal is to make clothes that are perennial,” Borsarello offered. “We’re doing things little by little, to make sure they’re as good tomorrow as they are today.”
5 March 2020
Holiday Boileau is two years old. At a certain point in a little brand’s life, a designer is faced with an existential dilemma: Do we get bigger and possibly lose the essence of the label, or do we retain it and stay small? Much of the time, designers choose door number one. Behind it is more publicity and bigger paychecks, but inevitably also compromise. Holiday founder Franck Durand and his style director Gauthier Borsarello have opted for door two.“Real luxury is something tiny,” Borsarello said at a preview of the brand’s latest collection. “That’s why we’re in the 16th Arrondissement. We try to defend the quiet life. We have the restaurant, which is vegan [as of September]; we have a vintage store. It feels like a village. We’re not in a hurry to be huge.” Their instincts to resist corporatization and to keep Holiday at a human scale jibe with the current moment. In the end, the Spring 2020 shows felt optimistic and upbeat, but there was an unmissable undercurrent of concern about the industry’s excesses and waste.“When we launched,” Durand said, “it was for fun. But today we can’t propose clothes just for fun. We know the cost.” The brand is just beginning its sustainability journey; Durand and Borsarello’s first steps have been to keep the new offering precise and considered. Some of the trendy details of seasons past—athleisure, Westernwear—have been shelved for a more classic sensibility. The new offering mostly consists of foundational pieces, but not without that original sense of fun. A “crazy” shirt patch-worked with electric colors more than qualified.
23 October 2019
If you follow fashion, you’ve seen Franck Durand’s Holiday sweatshirts—maybe in a Paris street style pic or online at MatchesFashion.com and Mr Porter. That micro-collection of colorful sweatshirts—itself an extension of the vintage travel magazine,Holiday, that the art director revived in 2014—is quickly developing into a fledgling unisex ready-to-wear line. Naturally, many of the pieces feature the Holiday lettering—with a name that good, why not? But this little label is about more than a logo.The Holiday ethos is easy, chic, and better constructed than it might be expected to be. Durand has his tailoring made by Boglioli, the fine Italian suit-makers, and he’s not ashamed to tell you so. In fact, quite the opposite. He says, “There are too many designers already, this is about making clothes the old-school way.” The suits get their shapes from fabrics, not from their construction. There’s no padding at the shoulders and no glue at the seams, which means you can toss the navy cotton blazer, for example, in the wash and not worry. The red, white, and blue striped jean jacket is modeled off of a 1950s original, all the way down to the rounded pocket seams. And the circa-1960s blouson button-downs—wear them untucked and not look sloppy—are cut with carefully considered swallow collars.Durand says a lot of ideas come from back issues ofHoliday—one of the benefits of owning the magazine archive. But most are driven by his own bourgeois tastes, developed over the course of a career behind the scenes. Take the Japanese canvas pants in a delicate shade of lilac. They’re tubular, without side seams, for comfort. “It’s not fashion,” he says, “it’s style.”Boileau, which is also featured on those logo sweatshirts, is the Paris neighborhood where Durand lives and has opened a Holiday café (2016) and a Holiday store (2017). That’s what we mean when we say developing quickly.
4 July 2018