The Eye

by Nathan Williams

  The Royal College of Art’s fashion program was founded by former Vogue editor Madge Garland in 1948. The university has been influential in training many of today’s celebrated designers, including Waight Keller, Christopher Bailey, Peter Copping and milliner Philip Treacy.

  Her hint of nonchalance is overshadowed by a more reserved and considered demeanor, one often described as serene. In an industry so dominated by overtly flamboyant (and usually male) characters, Waight Keller has cultivated a calmer management style. “I have worked for crazy people, so I know when you get that sort of anxiety in a room, it affects you as a designer and the people working for you—you don’t get the best out of them,” she confides frankly. “I prefer calmness, which brings a sense of comfort to a working process that is very intense.” This calm, composed demeanor, however, might be mistaken for a cautious approach, one that is less combative but ultimately selective. Such a characterization is clearly not something that Givenchy’s new creative head is willing to entertain. As she describes her working style, it’s easy to build a picture of an acutely observant way of directing. “I talk a lot during meetings; there is a lot of information that comes out as I’m working through things, in the fittings and while choosing fabrics. I go through the style process, so in that sense, there is a very clear idea to how I approach my work.” In fact, it becomes apparent that far from being a serene and silent presence, Waight Keller has a very talkative and thoroughly open quality. “Whenever there is tension, usually it is because someone has not shared something,” she continues. “I think that’s often when things go wrong.”

  When heading up such a well-known and expansive fashion house, with its many divisions, surely maintaining creative integrity is a challenge. Moving into a bigger brand, does the artistic director find the pressure to sell all consuming? “I think that the balance is increasingly hard,” she ponders. “The size of the business has become such that you need to have a base of things that are—let’s say—consistent.” She then begins explaining the function and approach to different collections and products of the Givenchy brand: From eyewear to children’s clothing, to the couture of the shows and, most important, the pre-show collections, there is no doubt where Waight Keller’s passion lies. “For me, the shows are absolutely the most exciting part. There is no balance between the creative and the commercial. It really is a pure expression of creativity.”

  Looking back at her career, Givenchy’s artistic director surmises that she has always relished getting under the skin of something else. “I find the whole process of understanding a brand and then developing into it very intriguing,” she says, rejecting what she calls a “knee-jerk” reaction to always wanting to create something new. This considered brand cultivation is something that defines Waight Keller and perhaps explains why she was drafted to reinterpret one of the most prestigious Paris fashion houses, rather than simply transform it.

  Her much-anticipated first collection for Givenchy was advertised locally with the help of a black cat that appeared on WANTED posters around town. “Back at Chloé, the identity of the brand was tied to the spirit of the clothes and the look of the girl,” she explains. “Here it’s different. It’s a much more exciting platform to go from, as it’s a blank page!” This new canvas, where models of the feline rather than human variety take center stage, is showing the fashion industry that a safe pair of hands can still offer plenty of surprises.*

  Waight Keller arrived at the 2018 Met Gala alongside actress Rooney Mara, who donned a blue and silver gown from the designer’s Spring couture collection. Shortly after, Mara was named Givenchy’s new fragrance ambassador.

  The biggest break in my career was really my first one.

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  Van Noten says the simple act of gardening saved him and his relationship during the ’90s. The designer collaborated with landscape architect Erik Dhont on a sprawling 55-acre park and garden at his home in Leir.

  Dries Van Noten

  Dries Van Noten

  It’s been roughly three decades since Belgian designer Dries Van Noten made his name in the fashion industry by taking a caravan of clothes across the Channel to show in London. Five fellow graduates of the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts, including Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck and Dirk Bikkembergs, famously joined him. The Antwerp Six, as they called themselves, gained immediate notoriety for their avant-garde, highly original creative vision, and Van Noten’s personal ascent has been steady ever since. Yet you might not know it. The soft-spoken Belgian still lives close to Antwerp. He still runs and owns the company. He has never advertised. In almost every way, Van Noten has stayed true to the graduate he was in the early 1980s. To him, there would be no other way. “I’ve never lived in a big city because I’ve always been quite comfortable here,” he says. “It allows me to be inspired. A big city can eat your energy, I think.”

  Growing up in a household governed by clothes, Van Noten was almost destined to become a fashion designer. His grandfather mended secondhand clothes during the World Wars while his father ran a series of boutiques. Van Noten’s mother collected antique linen and lace and worked in a fashion store. Having been surrounded by the garment business, he says, could have gone one of two ways: “I could have said, ‘No, I want to do the complete opposite.’ But I loved it. I adored the whole world. Originally the idea was that I was going to take over the business, which was about buying and selling clothes. Quite quickly, though, I discovered that designing clothes was even more fun.”

  Creatively, Van Noten has always followed his own path. He is known for intelligent, considered clothes instead of fast, showy fashion. Pattern, color and a stern Northern European romance are the three loose pillars that have defined his career, but never exclusively. His is a style resolutely difficult to categorize, possibly because Van Noten resists getting into the habit of starting a new season in any particular way. He has no tried-and-tested tricks beyond having a fresh slate. “We clean up the table every time we start a collection. I like the creative arc to go through questioning, putting things on the table, redoing them. Sometimes you come out where you started, sometimes it’s a logical evolution of the season before, but it’s never that I think, ‘We sold this last season really well so let’s continue like that,’” he explains. “We start all over again and see where we end up.” Van Noten also likes to be organized but not pathologically so. Most of the time, he can be found sitting at one of two tables—one for womenswear, one for men’s—but he likes to work organically. “It’s not like I keep Tuesday afternoons and Monday mornings for knitwear,” he says.

  India is a source of in­-trigue for the designer. “I learned a lot from India, and I think my Indian manufacturers learned a lot from me,” he explained to Vogue, noting that “gold doesn’t always have to be brash and shiny; gold can be also subtle,” and that “the value of handwork is so important.”

  We start all over again and see where we end up.

  Success was almost immediate for Van Noten and his Antwerp Six comrades. He remembers there being a healthy, positive competition between them: collegiate, in that they all learned from each other, and yet competitive, in that they pushed each other forward. Van Noten’s big break came when, having gone solo, he received an order from Barneys New York, which remains a loyal customer to this day. “They bought big quantities so immediately I was like, ‘Oops, I have to organize production.’ It was 36 of this and 55 of those,” he recalls. “My apartment became an office with fabric all over the kitchen and shipping and everything in the sitting room.”

  It was the 1980s, and the Belgian wave had followed an exciting opening in the fashion world. There was Giorgio Armani and the Italian movement in the late 1970s; the English set including Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano and the New Romantics; the first Comme des Garçons collection in 1981 followed by Yohji Yamamoto the year after. Fashion was thirsty, open-minded and highly global: the perfect cont
ext for six graduates from the lowlands to make their name. “We’re talking about all of this in just six years!” he reflects. “It proved to us that if people would accept fashion from Japan, maybe they’d accept fashion from the most unfashionable country in the world: Belgium.” The group initially had reservations, though. Flemish names are famously tricky to pronounce, and the Antwerp Six had all considered changing theirs to something easier. “We were all very jealous of Martin Margiela [an honorary member of the group] because he had an Italian-sounding name,” Van Noten says.

  Today, you get the feeling that his extracurricular activities are as important as the work—and deeply connected to it. He is a keen gardener and likes making jam. He and his partner, Patrick, enjoy art fairs and exhibitions. They regularly go to Italy for short trips, or take the car to England to visit stately homes and gardens there. All these elements feed back into Van Noten’s collections subtly, implicitly and—occasionally—rather slowly. “Sometimes something that you took notice of 20 years ago suddenly makes sense. It’s not like I see an exhibition and it automatically comes across in the next collection,” he says. It’s perhaps this sponge-like creative process that explains the layered, unclassifiable quality of his work. “The collections that I make now are more mature because I’ve seen more things and learned more things,” he says.

  Yet age has not necessarily brought wisdom; it’s something Van Noten has had all along. He has always maintained both creative control of the company and control of its business operations. He is one of the few figures in fashion who balances the title of creative director with that of chief executive and therefore has never been worn into the ground by the pressures of 10 collections per season, plus fragrances and ad campaigns. The Dries Van Noten brand has never become a burden to him, but is something to indulge in alongside his other interests like food, gardening and art. He says creating, consuming and—crucially—enjoying things is an important balance to keep.

  “To enjoy a garden, you have to walk in it, you have to eat from it. With food, if you make the most beautiful cake and there is no one there to eat it, what purpose does it have?” he says. “I love to make clothes, but people have to wear them; otherwise, I don’t see the sense in it.” *

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  Celebrating his 100th fashion show in 2017, the designer spent his entire budget to bring back the models from previous shows.

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  Yamamoto says he can’t imagine himself retired. “I also think it’s hard to imagine my brand without me,” he told i-D. “I think Yohji Yamamoto will die with Yohji Yamamoto.”

  Yohji Yamamoto

  Yohji Yamamoto

  Y-3

  Y’s

  Known for his philosophical approach to design, Yohji Yamamoto is one of fashion’s most pioneering and idiosyncratic thinkers, often finding lyrical parallels between clothing and the curiosity of the human condition. “Just as man lives and grows old, so too does fabric live and age,” he theorizes in his poetic 2010 autobiography, My Dear Bomb. “When fabric is left to age for a year or two, it naturally contracts, and at this point, it reveals its charm.”

  Alongside contemporaries including Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake and Keno Takada, Yamamoto was one of the leading proponents of the avant-garde design wave that emerged from Japan in the 1970s and ’80s. Artfully mixing high concept and traditional craftsmanship, they transformed global fashion with radical new ideas on gender, streetwear and contemporary garment construction.

  If it’s possible to define the Yamamoto signature, it is perhaps his uncanny desire to design clothing that feels aged, preworn and imperfect. “I think perfection is ugly,” he stated in his 2002 publication Talking to Myself. “Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.” As such, his unstructured, “anti-fit” silhouettes with their asymmetric lines, distressed finishes and raw seams create a masterful sense of dishevelment. Often turning to ancient Japanese draping and European tailoring techniques for inspiration, Yamamoto also provides an oddly familiar touch to his collections. By infusing his designs with age and wear, Yamamoto attempts to create the security of a favorite old sweater or coat that envelops and guards the wearer’s body. “I make clothing like armor,” he told Details magazine in 2005. “My clothing protects you from unwelcome eyes.”

  This singular vision often places Yamamoto at odds with current trends. “I want to achieve anti-fashion through fashion. That’s why I’m always heading in my own direction, in parallel to fashion,” he explains in Talking to Myself. Throughout his long career he has always opposed trend-led design, often decrying the superficiality of fast fashion and modern digital culture. Instead, his vision is a more subversive driving force that counterbalances the momentum and direction of contemporary style. “I hate fashion,” he later reveals. “Or the word fashion, which sounds colorful, extravagant, expensive and gorgeous. I never wanted to walk the main street of fashion. I have been walking the sidewalks of fashion from the beginning, so I’m a bit dark.”

  Yamamoto spent his early life studying law in Tokyo, but soon after graduating and starting to work in the field, he realized that he had no real interest in pursuing it as a career. At the time, his mother owned a dressmaking business, and it was while working for her that he learned how to cut and sew from skilled seamstresses. Quickly discovering a talent for design and tailoring, he enrolled in the prestigious Bunka Fashion College. Yamamoto’s first label was launched in 1972 in Tokyo, a ready-to-wear women’s line called Y’s, with a namesake men’s line launching two years later. In the early 1980s he moved to Paris, the city where his young brands would flourish and develop their signature eclectic mix—androgynous silhouettes informed by historical design references and a decidedly modern elegance.

  In 2003, Adidas and Yamamoto debuted a new sportswear line called Y-3. The “Y” stands for Yohji Yamamoto, the “3” represents Adidas’ three signature stripes, and the dash signifies the bond between the two. The collaboration pioneered the breakdown between sport and fashion, well before the buzzword “athleisure” was ever uttered.

  My clothing protects you from unwelcome eyes.

  His first show caused outrage in parts of the fashion world, condemned as “Hiroshima chic” by many in the French press who were shocked by his fiercely abstract all-black looks. Yet others seemed to instantly recognize something interesting in his work, and as he continued to find his voice as a designer, he achieved growing acclaim for using his platform as a way to discuss new cultural shifts.

  Today, Yamamoto’s multiple fashion lines have a cultlike level of devotion around the world. Continually challenging notions of what fashion can be, he has undertaken unique collaborations with brands such as Adidas, Hermès and Mikimoto as well as artists, filmmakers and choreographers including Heiner Müller, Wim Wenders and Pina Bausch.† In recognition of his contributions to culture and fashion, he has received an array of notable awards including France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon from the government of Japan.

  Yamamoto himself is an enigma. Rarely giving interviews, he appears equal parts bold iconoclast and introspective, humble philosopher. In a 2013 conversation with his friend and collaborator Wim Wenders for Interview magazine, Yamamoto told the filmmaker, “I feel like I have become a living fossil in the fashion world . . . I was on a Japanese designers’ pedestal—considered a maestro. My design was getting closer to a couturier’s work, and I felt like I was missing something.” He continued, “At a certain point, I stopped seeing my clothing worn by people on the streets . . . it seemed like they were being treated as museum items.” His work may examine complex, cerebral ideas but Yamamoto wants above all for his collections to connect with the simple realities of life. To this point, his autobiography offers readers a wry piece of advice: “Rather than prattle on endlessly about art and concept, one is better served by living.”* />
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  Growing up in poverty with a widowed mother, Yamamoto says he realized that the world was unfair by the age of five.

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  The Cannes-born designer only realized the possibility of a future in fashion after seeing an Yves Saint Laurent show on television.

  Bouchra Jarrar

  Bouchra Jarrar

  Lanvin

  Balenciaga

  Bouchra Jarrar sits tucked behind the colonnade on the terrace of Le Nemours, a Parisian bistro located between the Louvre and the Palais-Royal gardens. Facing Place Colette, she peers out at the mix of Parisians and tourists. Jarrar is petite; her signature bangs fall into her eyes, making her look like a French version of Emily the Strange. She speaks softly, but makes gestures that betray a buzzing enthusiasm.