It’s Paris Fashion Week and Marine Serre is the latest brand exploring different ways to showcase her SS22 collection. Choosing to opt out of a show, Marine Serre went for a fashion-film, titled ‘Ostal24’, but this didn’t stop hordes of onlookers in Paris storming the film’s premiere at Marais in hopes of viewing the collection first. ‘Ostal 24’ is broken into vignettes captioned with timestamps, in which dawn yoga, communal cooking, the handmade alteration of clothes and wild dancing elicits a strange sense of calm. The garments are interwoven with the film itself: they become impossible to separate into fashion and life, which fittingly is what Serre, as a brand, stands for.
As ever, eco-consciousness was a major consideration for the brand. It incorporated everything from regenerated denim patchwork to embroidered dutch tablecloths, to upcycled nylons which were reworked into capes, cowls, and even water bottle holders.
Her choice of fabric – the cottons and linens from the domestic sphere – spoke to the pride to be had in the everyday; a rejection of all of fashion’s usual overbearingness. It contributed to the lasting impression that this collection was exactly right for this moment; the now-entrenched assimilation of luxury and exclusivity, removed from ‘everyday’ life, needs to be left behind.
Serre’s iconic crescent moon logo was also a prevalent feature throughout the collection, appearing sewn into macramé and stamped across their signature bodysuits. Despite the difficulty surrounding fashion’s ongoing dialogue with sustainability when producing new collections, Marine Serre herself is starkly conscious about her carbon footprint, and thus this collection is 90% recycled and regenerated.
This collection pushed further than the core staples that fans have grown to love; layers of recycled popcorn fabric (seen also in Chet Lo’s LFW debut) were pinched into garments which came alive with texture. There were piles of repurposed silk scarves, Y2K-inspired chains, and forks reconfigured into earrings.
Speaking about these choices, Serre expressed that she wanted “people to feel the beauty and the simplicity of being together and finding joy in cooking, eating, dancing, yoga… And at the same time recognize that everyday we make choices that have an impact. … Fashion is about more than draping fabric and making a profit, it can be a place where we are free to take meaningful action.” Crystallising the core elements of both the collection and the brand’s ethos as a whole into the concepts of fun, skillfulness and sustainability.Marine Serre here displays the eco-progressiveness of her brand, something we should all take note of and champion.
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