To paraphrase Isabel Marant herself—the Parisienne incarnate of her generation—the trick to getting that effortless Paris chic is to put a whole lot of work into making it look effortless. Marant always designed for the way she wanted to dress, with perfectly intentional imperfection, while at the same time appearing not to have paid attention to the whole affair.
Her longtime right arm, Kim Bekker, was already in Paris early in Marant's arc. Perhaps it is because she knows the brand's canon by heart that she could pick an exact year, 2010, and actually pluck from her own closet a piece of that vintage—a soft gray popover, chicer than a sweatshirt, less fussy than a button-down—to wear as a kind of lucky token during this show. “It’s very real life. For me, that time was about togetherness,” Bekker reflected backstage before the show. “She’s this girl who was running around Paris and going from show to show with the denims and black jacket—it feels like going back in time. I’m obsessed with the period, I’m not sure why. I think it’s probably because there was something very true to the garments that Isabel was making.”
Not surprisingly, that meant denim all the way, which came with distressed embroidery (a good number of looks were largely styled bleu, blanc, rouge; that could hardly have been a fluke). Big jackets are trending next season, and here Bekker delivered a reversible bomber in silk with stylized Chinese knot buttons, shown white-side out in the opening look and red-side out in look 28. Likewise, the denim jacket with the red collar in look 4 returned in look 15, with its red quilting on the outside. A few variations on the theme, in fur, shearling and leather, packed some strut.
Bekker knows how to tick the boxes, and she did that here, right down to resurrecting a snake print from fall 2010, and mixing in some zebra, too. By some measures, it looked effortless. But if Marant is going to trickle down successfully to a new generation, there will have to be a few fresh ideas in the mix. The Parisienne deserves nothing less.
