In a season of this much industry shift and change, one might do well to remember the following: 1.) It is certainly not easy to be an entrepreneur, to break out and create your own brand. 2.) But it may in fact be harder to take up the reins and attempt to steer somebody else’s. 3.) This industry necessitates both situations. The result is that, increasingly, young designers tasked with taking storied (read: old) brands into the (young and fun) future seem to instead turn to the past.
At their Spring show for Carven, Alexis Martial and Adrien Caillaudaud imagined “Madame Carven’s imaginary heiress” traipsing with friends through her family’s stately pile, digging around in the designer’s archive and reinterpreting the old classics. This had been Anthony Vaccarello’s take on Saint Laurent, too: thrift-shop finds from the house’s halcyon days in the 1980s, cut and customized by the young, hip, girl-about-town of today. At Carven, it meant stripes and florals and crests and narrow cargo pants, a thickly bejeweled belt around the waist, and scarf-patterned silks worn as asymmetrical skirts. Several items were meant to conjure the image of a girl draping herself in an old wedding veil, à la Miss Havisham.
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