When Fashion Breaking the news last week that Ludovic de Saint Sernin will be the eighth guest designer to create a season of Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture, he said his own collection would bring new ideas despite the decision to skip a runway show.
In a whitewashed gallery in the Marais, he explained what this means. “We want to build the structure to support our growth. We don’t want to be everywhere and then we won’t be able to sustain growth,” says the designer. “We’ve worked with people like Dua Lipa, Sabrina Carpenter and Troye Sivan, who perform a lot, and we think about the garments in a very different way.”
Cue BDSM Ballet, a pretty accurate description of the two main influences, tightly strung together, just like De Saint Sernin’s best-selling bralettes and briefs. The accompanying photos, taken by Adam Peter Johnson, show models convincingly acting as dancers – plainly dressed and off-duty – radiating the kind of angel-demon tension of Black Swanwhich inspired the designer in addition to Pina Bausch’s choreography.
While there’s no escaping the fact that a collection that references dance deserves a show, De Saint Sernin’s explorations of eroticism translate into performance and photography, as evidenced by last season’s special catwalk show in New York, which paid tribute to Robert Mapplethorpe (made in collaboration with the artists’ foundation). Here De Saint Sernin introduced voluminous and layered volumes in tulle and softer fabrics that hung low on the hips, babydoll dresses and waistcoats in real feathers or textured wool ‘mille-feuille’.
There were very streamlined ideas: flowing dresses that knotted over the décolleté and went down low in the décolleté, were made of a jersey from Japan (where Saint Sernin gets almost all its fabrics from) that had the transparency of semi-transparent tights . More elaborate pieces, such as a crystal-lattice bolero or a top made from a single square of leather, had nearly 1,400 hand-placed eyelets (on a more commercial version, they are hot-attached). Most impressive was a sculptural dress consisting of eyelets that wrapped around the body—like a descendant of Alaïa’s famous zipper dress, only the straps were more staggered and suspended by invisible threads. And while chaps may not qualify as sculptural, let’s just say they provide a taste of what De Saint Sernin might imagine as his men’s looks for Gaultier. For both men and women, collared shirts and micro shorts topped with a suede blouson or trench coat once again emphasized its everyday, gender-fluid allure.
Unsurprisingly, De Saint Sernin said he would like to design ballet costumes, and it certainly felt like he was manifesting his next big moment. “The dream is to have these projects outside of fashion,” he said. As for the eye-catching ballerina shoes with eyelets, they came from an early collaboration LdSS had with Repetto, perhaps for an encore.