“It’s a very heat wave-friendly collection,” Kévin Germanier said in jest just before his fall show, which was a sweltering affair in the heart of the Palais de Tokyo.
Mother Nature wasn’t the only one turning up the heat, as the Swiss designer served up one of his sultriest collections yet, filled with sinuous plunging necklines, hip-baring cuts and strategically placed whorls of fabric or loops of rhodoid.
Germanier titled his fall couture “The Sulphurous,” playing on the word’s layered meaning in French.
One way to read it was the expression describing a whiff of scandal and his defiantly resourceful approach that started with beads extracted from a Hong Kong landfill.
“Anyone can go to Lesage and look at the samples,” he said. “I love getting my hands dirty [and] being hands-on in discovering materials. I think that may be the future as well — creating with what’s already around you.”
Ever the optimist and notwithstanding his deep-seated instinct for upcycling, Germanier tied sulfur to the idea of fireworks, from reactive mélange to settling ash, backed to his own proclivity for explosions in colors and shapes. Case in point: front row guest Fan Bingbing and her riotous outfit.
This time in monochromes and demure-for-Germanier two-tone pairings that had him joking that “you don’t need the rainbow everywhere, just once or twice,” they took a backseat to his expanding palette of upcycled options. These have grown since last season to include leftover products from LVMH-owned fashion houses — seven of them for this time, he said with pride.
Having ready-made items at his fingertips helped anchor Germanier’s work, rather than make him a slouch in the construction department or blinker him to what else can be pressed into service.
The structure of earmuffs was reworked to turn the headgear into cyber-looking bustier bikini tops. Windbreakers were repurposed into a silver party skirt, augmented with feathery trims and a tubular pool float serving as a crinoline. Those trousers, originally 4XL in size, were cut down to size, hand-dyed and fringed with long beaded strands.
Studded on the outfit worn by model Ajak Deng were brightly colored tips that started their lives as pencils from Swiss writing instrument specialist Caran d’Ache that had been whittled into shape by the in-house carpenter of La Caserne, the multipurpose creative hub where Germanier has his studio.
“It’s this very human process that I adore,” Germanier said. “That sometimes, you make do, you find, you dig and you have all the resources right there.” Hear, hear.
