Olivier Theyskens (Q7771)
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Olivier Theyskens is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Olivier Theyskens |
Olivier Theyskens is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
On a day with three of the biggest guns of Paris on the schedule, each one boasting, if that’s the right word, its own unique mix of celebrities and traffic jams, Olivier Theyskens offered something different. Down a quiet street in the Marais, he opened the courtyard of his studio at twilight, set out the champagne—we needed a drink after the soaked back-and-forthing in the rain—and walked marveling observers around an arrangement of 26 exquisite looks, all of them made by his tiny team of six, many by hand.The corporate Goliaths should be taking a closer look at this designer David. Theyskens has toiled in the ateliers of this city’s maisons in the past, he held creative director titles at Rochas and Nina Ricci, where he made some of the most romantic and transportive collections of the 2000s. He seemed poised to make the leap to a larger house—one of those Paris big guns—but it never happened. Eventually, he moved to New York and worked briefly for the sportswear company Theory, then returned to Paris and relaunched his own label five years ago; it was a small operation and his attenuated tailoring and gothic evening gowns didn’t find a big audience.Then the pandemic happened; it was an especially cruel time for emerging businesses like his, but a creative spark came. Theyskens started piecing together fabric scraps accumulated over two decades, cooking them up—literally—into some of the most heavenly frocks this side of the couture. Bias-cut puzzles of silk, lace, and velvet leftovers, each a one-of-a-kind gem, they’re so labor-intensive to make they can’t be retailed in stores, but that doesn’t mean he’s not selling them. Though they can cost $25,000 or more, there’s now a waitlist.This collection is the third in a series. It’s grown beyond willowy patch-worked dresses to include a knit all-in-one featuring roughly 10,000 jet beads, a duster coat assembled from leather off-cuts embroidered one-by-one on tulle, and the sort of long, lean, just shy of severe tailoring Theyskens favors. The willowy patch-worked dresses have evolved too. He’s built them with shoulder pads for a new sense of structure and cut some with slits, which is the kind of silhouette that red carpet types favor. Together, the three-season trilogy makes for a very convincing job application should the right position become available.
3 October 2022
There were quite a few more people at Olivier Theyskens’s presentation this season than last. It doesn’t take the backing of a corporate super power to fill a room, it takes talent. Theyskens has talent aplenty and he applied it with tender care to the 26 pieces he developed for this collection, a second chapter of the story he began last October.During Covid, Theyskens shook up his way of creating, spending the long months of isolation mostly alone or with a small team working on dresses made in the old ways that used scraps of fabric which he patchworked on the bias and then treated to a time-intensive cooking process that enhanced their vintage feeling. A collaborator said each one took a week to make. There’s no way to reproduce these dresses at scale, which means it’s not just Theyskens’s way of working that was rearranged, but his company’s business plan.That raises all sorts of thoughts about fashion’s corporate super structures and the pressures for growth. Can a small business thrive in a global industry? Can a creative director whose responsibilities extend well beyond the design room go back to being a dressmaker again? Theyskens seems to have made the decision to try, and we as fashion lovers are the beneficiaries. This collection was as sublime as last season’s, but with a new breadth. To his patchwork dresses he added horizontal stripes of lace or crochet; it’s a daunting challenge combining fabrics cut on the bias and on the straight grain, but he and his team handled it deftly. On other dresses he added inner corsetry, which could turn on women who want more structure and support from their evening dresses. There were also willowy numbers in rich hues of crushed velvet and washed silk that require less handwork to make, meaning they might be less expensive to acquire and cherish.The medallion necklaces that accessorized some of the looks were made with Ariel de Ravenel for Loulou de la Falaise. It was a natural collaboration; Theyskens and de Ravenel are friends. But we shouldn’t necessarily expect a flurry of future partnerships. Theyskens doesn’t appear to be interested in the industry’s typical routes to success. For now, this project is bringing its own rewards. “What has happened in the world is so consequential, I really wanted to rescale my business,” he said. “And really, I found so much happiness in making things. It’s a collection made with pure love.
” Still, how extraordinary would it be if Nicole Kidman, say, were to wear the deep green number to the Oscars later this month?
8 March 2022
There was no fanfare ahead of Olivier Theyskens’s presentation tonight. Stepping into the Palais Galliera, most of us expected a runway show, along the lines of what he was doing pre-COVID. What we got instead was 22 looks arranged on mannequins, each hand-made by Theyskens and his tiny team of assistants, and each one-of-a-kind. It was sublime.Walking the circumference of the Palais’s rotunda, Theyskens said, “it’s a little bit of a special collection, because it took a year to do, and it’s been done entirely in my studio.” (Theyskens skipped the fall 2021 collections in February.) Most of the component pieces are fabric scraps or swatches of fabrics from mills he called “coupons.” His process involved patchworking those swatches, which he cut on the bias and arranged by color, print, or theme. Then “everything was cooked.” Cooked? “It’s crunched and under pressure, a little bit like what was done as a process by Fortuny.”The silhouettes are close to the body, but because the scraps are cut on the bias, the results are surprisingly versatile. As willowy as the dresses look, and they do look willowy on the petite but tall mannequins, Theyskens reports that they stretched to accommodate his friends’ pregnant bellies during the development process. The real magic was in his arrangement of the fabric scraps. One dress was a symphony of pastels, another combined many, many shades of red, a third mixed up different prints and patterns in the Japanese boro style. The cooking procedure meant some of the colors bled into their neighbors, adding depth and dimension to the collages of fabric.There’s also a hook-and-eye closure jacket and a naked dress, both embroidered with feathers. The naked dress was subject to the same washing process as the patchwork numbers, which gave its feathers an unusual texture. Because of the laborious hand work involved in the making of these pieces, large department store and e-commerce orders won’t be possible; they’ll be sold as one-offs to individual clients. Theyskens seemed genuinely sanguine about that arrangement. “I’d like to go back to working with factories,” he said with a laugh. “But this is a passion, a pleasure.” It showed.
5 October 2021
The French singer Mylène Farmer was a fixation of Olivier Theyskens during his adolescence. “There’s a short window from about 1987 to 1990 when I was really obsessed,” the designer said via Zoom. Being a Kate Bush girl in those years, this writer knows next to nothing about Gallic pop music of the era, so Theyskens revved up his iPad. “She was very famous in France. I loved her universe, her voice,” he began. “During confinement I watched clips of her from that era and I realized that a lot of things common to my aesthetic came from her. It was interesting for me as an adult to dive back into that nostalgia.”The confinement of quarantine has prompted all sorts of self-reflection. Either out of yearning for a more innocent time or out of necessity (with mills and factories closed or running at reduced capacity), designers are reviving silhouettes from their past and pulling old fabrics out of storage. The process has resulted in smaller, tighter collections, and more personal ones too, with the unnecessary and irrelevant—runway filler, is another way to put it—stripped away.Theyskens’s new collection is a 2021 alternative to Farmer’s 1980s wardrobe and a trip through his own archive. Look one, with its fitted bodice and long, full skirt, calls to mind the yellow hook-and-eye gown that Madonna pulled from the designer for the 1998 VH1 Fashion Awards. It was only through his research this season that he realized that he must have lifted inspiration for that red carpet sensation from a Farmer video clip about 10 years earlier.If and when red carpets come back, celebrity stylists will be seeking Theyskens out. Most designers ignored the category, which only serves to spotlight his talents in this area. See a velvet bustier dress that he hand-dyed to fade from eau de Nil to blush pink and an ivory bias-cut silk negligee gown with a dramatic twist of volume below the knees. The soft, unstructured shapes of androgynous suits and the New Romantic jabot blouses are callbacks to Farmer and more reasons to hope this long period of lockdown lifts and there are events to wear Theyskens’s special clothes next year.
2 October 2020
“To go back to my essentials.” Maybe because he just took an artistic director position at Azzaro, where he’ll be making couture, Olivier Theyskens’s instinct this season was to clarify and condense. In the past, the Belgian has been known for mid-20th-century couture shapes and neo-Edwardian romance. He taught us how to dress up again after 9/11, and he kept us in romantic frocks for most of the aughts. The essentials he was talking about this evening date from the origins of his eponymous collection three and a half years ago. He doesn’t have a big corporation behind him anymore, which is another way of saying he kept things more or less straightforward and street ready.The first look out was an A-line black leather miniskirt with his signature hook-and-eye closures, a silky black turtleneck, and a black leather coat. The last look was a silky black turtleneck floor-length dress with long sleeves. In between, Theyskens kept the palette strict and the silhouette similarly simplified. Though there was a minimal spareness to the proceedings, he nonetheless managed to convey drama via silhouette. Short lengths are in the air, and he addressed those at the top of the show, but it was the floor-length numbers that caught the crowd’s attention in both sleeveless and long-sleeve variations. Otherwise, a pair of slightly oversized mannish pantsuits had a timely appeal. Still, let’s face it, we’ll always be looking for the frisson Theyskens so reliably produced at Rochas and later at Nina Ricci—it’s why we come back. With simplicity the order of the day here, we’ll be keeping an eye out for what he does in July at Azzaro.
28 February 2020
At this moment in the season, the trends are coming together. Lingerie as outerwear is a thing for Spring. Black is the new black. And designers en masse have determined to get women out of their comfy sneakers, preferably into a pair of towering platforms. Olivier Theyskens’s collection touched on all three points today, but this Belgian isn’t a guy who thinks in seasons or devotes much time to what’s in and what’s out. Since reestablishing his eponymous line three years ago, he’s only refined his design message. He likes an attenuated silhouette, he loves black, and now, as 20 years ago when he emerged on the scene, hooks and eyes are his predominant leitmotif.This season Theyskens was preoccupied with the actual making of the clothes, a process he says he relishes. He wanted to expose the darting techniques, leave edges unfinished, and use lining fabric in place of finer materials. This meant that on a pair of jackets the vertical seams that gave them their nipped waist shape were visible on the outside of the garments, and the lace hem of a midi skirt was attached on its exterior, rather than its interior. These were the right instincts; those techniques served to soften the more severe of his cuts, and to give them a cooler vibe than they might otherwise have had. Even evening dresses got the inside-out treatment. A strapless dress in tiers of natural-color linen was both humble and grand, and accessorized with a black leather shoulder harness, it was evocative of the goth gowns this designer was making two decades ago.Theyskens has a steady eye. One way that he’s missing the current moment is with his quite narrow view of womanhood. To cast and cut for different-size women might push him forward.
27 September 2019
Walking into Olivier Theyskens’s new studio in the 10th arrondissement is like stepping back in time, with a mosaic tile floor and silk wallpaper dating to the late 1800s. Hugging the ceiling is a border; in a font with an Art Nouveau flourish are the wordsà chacun selon ses oeuvres,which translates to “to each according to their work.” That seems fitting.Twenty years ago Theyskens was a rising star who had captured the fashion world’s (and Madonna’s) attention. A couple of creative directorships later, he’s quietly, determinedly rebuilding his brand. He doesn’t receive the same kind of consideration, partly because he’s swapped the sweeping gowns of his past for a more grounded sensibility, but he’s doing distinctive work that feels connected to his early oeuvre without glancing back. He has his own vocabulary.Having established traditional hook and eyes as a visual motif, this season Theyksens went in big for chrome hardware. Bias-cut swaths of silk are suspended from a single substantial hook below the neck; the resulting dress is a sexy wisp of a thing. Elsewhere, oversize hook and eyes fasten corsets with unique scoop necklines.There’s an erotic undercurrent to the new collection, but it’s commanding, not weak or submissive. Take, for example, the tailored jackets he cut with bras built into the lapels. They’re designed to be worn shirtless, but the bra could also be worn undone over a blouse or tee. “Then it just looks like she’s wearing a vest underneath,” he explained. It was a clever touch. Theyskens makes a kick-ass combat boot as well.
30 June 2019
Since landing back on the Paris calendar a couple of years ago, Olivier Theyskens’s shows have toggled between the high drama of his Rochas years and the day-to-day clothes he worked on at Theory. The diversity has apparently served him well. He has 45 stores worldwide, a number he says he’s content with.Today he made a commitment to drama. “It comes from a vision of the work of couturiers,” Theyskens said afterward, “but also a little nod toBlade Runner. You know, this is 2019, the year the movie was set in.” The designer played the music from the film backward, and he conjured the replicant Rachael’s formfitting skirtsuit alongside other attenuated silhouettes made in her likeness. Theyskens called it “retro-futurism.” Ridley Scott’s circa 1982 vision of 2019 was off the mark in some respects and spot-on in others. We don’t drive flying cars just yet, but we do talk to our computers, and the global climate is most definitely in crisis. On the fashion front, tailoring is experiencing a renaissance, and Theyskens’s extreme sculpted shoulders put him in the middle of that conversation.There was an almost replicant-like rigor to the suit jackets and narrow midi skirts, but Theyskens indicated that it was intentional. “It’s about the power of a great entrance,” he said. The comment triggered an image of an actress of stature wearing the black or silver five-button, single-breasted style on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival or Venice. Bias-cut silk-satin evening dresses had an Old Hollywood glamour of their own, with plunging décolletage.To end, Theyskens did a little channeling of his own archive. Twenty years ago, at 21, he created a pair of ball gowns with similar hook-and-eye embellishments. Madonna wore one to the VH1 Fashion Awards and set the young designer on his way. In that sense, this was a return to form.
1 March 2019
Olivier Theyskens used photos from Hans Bellmer’s famous fetish-yDollseries on dresses today. On the spectrum of suggestive sexual imagery—of which there’s been no shortage lately—Bellmer’s fairly sadistic work falls far to the kinky side of Christopher Kane’sJoy of Sexmotifs from a season ago. On today of all days, with the partisan-in-the-extreme U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing and the future of American women’s reproductive rights hanging in the balance, the prints felt a little tone-deaf.Bellmer aside, this collection found Theyskens digging into his source code. Previous runway shows of his have been more evenly split between tailoring and eveningwear. Here, he focused on his dressmaker side, channeling the high romance of his Rochas glory days with a lovely pair of gowns featuring double-tiered, crinolined skirts, and a special long black dress topped by a fitted velvet jacket tied with a baby blue silk ribbon at the neck.Theyskens’s almost prim skirt suits were accessorized with airy, floaty harnesses that looked like backpacks from the front. The point seemed to be to lend a note of utility to otherwise fairly demure silhouettes. Or else he wanted to create a sense offlou. There was a refreshing sense of clarity to a basic long-sleeved LBD, which he fit softly through the waist without making it constrictive.
28 September 2018
Olivier Theyskens launched his namesake collection two years ago now, and this is his first Resort offering. “Having the same clothes in stores for six months starts to look sleepy,” he acknowledged in his Marais atelier, which had been converted into a temporary showroom for sales. Though the Theyskens operation remains small, there are signs that it’s growing. To start, the designer is looking for a bigger workspace for himself and his team. But he’s not rushing things. That goes for real estate and it goes for his clothes, as well.The new Theyskens label is proudly quotidian—not ordinary, but definitely designed for the everyday. It’s a different approach from his years at Nina Ricci and Rochas. You could say, in fact, that his new work owes more to his time at Theory in New York than it does to French ateliers. He does tailoring and denim and slip dresses now, and the sturdy boots and oxfords his clients need for going about their busy days. On the tailoring front this season, he’s liking the look of an oversize, androgynous jacket in leather, with the sleeves scrunched up past the elbows. Pants come in a linen viscose in two shapes: high-waisted and full-legged or low-waisted and pegged. As boyish as that silhouette is, he continues to appreciate a feminine line. Cases in point: leather apron dresses with hook-and-eye fastenings and a corseted strapless tweed dress. The hooks and eyes reappear on Theyskens’s denim, which is thoughtfully done in a faded grayish wash with frayed edges.“I just thought of the essentials,” Theyskens said of his work developing this collection. The piece that looked the most essential from these eyes was a sturdy trench in a broody shade of khaki made definitively unordinary by its extra-large pockets.
4 July 2018