Business Of Fashion – 2 juillet 2018<\/p>\n
Julie de Libran celebrated the brand’s 50th anniversary by glossing its essence with something grander. <\/p>\n
BY TIM BLANKS<\/p>\n
PARIS, France \u2014 Every so often, God smiles on fashion. On Sunday morning, Julie de Libran showed her L\u2019Atelier collection for Sonia Rykiel in the courtyard of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The weather complied. Frederic Sanchez chose the Velvet Underground\u2019s \u201cSunday Morning\u201d for the soundtrack, and the song\u2019s strange, stinging sweetness was so perfect in context that you could feel critical faculties dissolving in the heat.<\/p>\n
Which ultimately was neither here nor there, because de Libran mounted a fabulous display of classic Rykielisms, ticking box after box: sailor stripes, bias-cut jersey, pea coat, trench, mutant tuxedo, slinky lingerie and, always, the signature louche knitwear that defined a few generations of free-thinking Left Bankers. When the Chambre Syndicale, the governing body of French fashion, invited de Libran to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Rykiel brand, she was at first a little intimidated. Then she realized that what she was being offered was time, a real luxury in fashion. So she took it. She called the result L\u2019Atelier because it was, after all, the expertise of the design studio that helped her gloss the brand\u2019s essence with something a little grander.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s what happened. Sonia launched her business in May 1968. Paris was in an activist uproar, and she rode that wave. It\u2019s the nature of historical cycles that last century\u2019s radical becomes this century\u2019s pillar of society, but de Libran managed to expertly embody Rykiel\u2019s transition. The multicoloured knit that dissolved into a chaos of threads would be \u201968. The hyper-restraint of a floor-length tuxedo dress with coq-trimmed sleeves could, for the enfeebled purposes of my then and now comparison, stand for the kind of look that might entrance a modern client. But there was so much more: the slouch of a sequined sweatshirt, the scaled-up man\u2019s suit, the classic Sonia sweater given some added SHAZAM! And the clich\u00e9d couture closer, the wedding dress, shown as a corseted extravagance over jeans.<\/p>\n
De Libran was supported by a wonderful model casting: Kirsten Owen, Malgosia Bela, Elise Crombez, Aymeline Valade. Faces! The seductive conviction of the whole presentation made you wish the designer could reinvent this situation for her tepid ready-to-wear shows.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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