For Australian label Aje, working with a cherished artist’s legacy, a resort collection created more than just clothes.
“I think this festival is less about sales, sales, sales and more about rewarding a great artist and idea” – Sabine Getty
what could happen. It’s so important, we need every single vote. Liberté, égalité, fraternité – here in France we try to concentrate on the fact that it is not impossible.”
It underscores the hopeful anticipation of the young designers; the 10 have come from South Korea, China, New Zealand and throughout Europe. There is an element of naivety – “the designers, they are shy, almost trembling”, Fontanel tells me – but there is a bravery and a confidence, too. “Now with the internet, if a teenager is interested in fashion, they can research, then buy, make things, create.”
What makes Hyères Festival unique as a competition for young designers is its openness to the local community. “I think also there’s a great communication between everyone, a great dialogue. Everyone is together, and it’s small enough that it allows great communication,” adds Hériard Dubreuil. Locals can sign up to a embroidery class with Lesage, learning how to use a needle and hook to decorate brooches. We all take them home as keepsakes, a little bit of Lesage magic. Lesage’s Murielle Lemoine is in residence with some of her team. A British staff member recalls how she was so enthralled by Lesage when representatives visited her design school of Central Saint Martins that she diverted her studies to embroidery. Never mind her lack of French – she only thought to pick up the language when she started work in its Paris ateliers. Lemoine has a similar story, of working for a month at Lesage during school holidays. “Just one month with Mr [François] Lesage when I was 17, and now I’ve stayed forever!” Lemoine says, her voice still filled with fascination. Her favourite pieces are from the 40s, when wartime austerity meant that needlework truly needed to innovate beyond the usual – and pricey – hallmarks of beauty. The Lesage team works three to five weeks on each collection. Karl Lagerfeld, “the creator, tells us what he wants – one word, sometimes, one colour! And we work on that. Lesage is the savoir faire of passion,” she says, showing me the Lesage workmanship on her Chanel jacket.
“I had heard about the Hyères Festival when I was starting my studies almost eight years ago, and I always knew that one day I would apply,” recalls Vanessa Schindler, the Swiss designer who took out a rare double by winning both the main prize and the public vote. The standard is high: another finalist, Marine Serre, who had worked with Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga and Raf Simons at Dior, will end up winning the LVMH Prize a few months later. South Korea’s Hyunwoo Kim topped his fashion design school in Seoul, and shows a collection taken from traditional Korean costumes and
Little Shop of Horrors, but with a mature elegance doused in jewel-toned colours. It is Schindler’s work that is an immediate stand-out. Memorable pieces include a cream dress with textured stripes – a piece that Schindler was initially unsure about until she had shown it at the festival. Inspired by liquidity and using a liquid polymer that takes days to dry, her designs are balanced between being technically innovative as well as devastatingly wearable. Organza is edged in textured silicon, giving them a shimmery visual effect despite their almost high-tech futuristic hand-feel: most pieces are not sewn but are fused together. More than one person tried to buy her evening gowns straight off her. And her silicon statement earrings that looked like hazy agate had to be prised out of many a fashion stylist’s hand (me too, guiltily), as Schindler explained with embarrassment that she had made them at the last minute for the competition’s runway show and weren’t fit to be properly worn.
Pierre Hardy, another judge of the festival, who first became involved in the festival when he was asked to illustrate posters in 1993, tells me that he is looking for a true creator, rather than an assistant or studio designer. Jewellery designer Sabine Getty, who shows me her miniature Chanel Gabrielle bag (“So practical! I’m wearing it all the time”), muses about deciding whether it’s best to reward innovation or wearability. “I try to get rid of the practical approach, and I think this festival is less about sales, sales, sales and more about rewarding a great artist and idea,” she says. “But there’s the right balance. Like Karl Lagerfeld always says: ‘It’s not art: it needs to be wearable.’”
Actress and festival jurist Melissa George is indulging in her love of fashion, dressing up each day. For a lunch held at a vineyard villa it is a head-to-toe Sonia Rykiel look, an off-white waisted mini-dress that called to mind Marie-Antoinette at Petit Trianon, with matching espadrilles; at the announcement for the winner it’s a full-sleeved Elsa Schiaparelli black gown. For the judging, she approaches it as a consumer but also with careful consideration of what the designer might become. “I’m looking for someone who can produce something that’s magical with the prize.”
As I write to Schindler months after the festival to ask about her progress since the competition, what she has become has gone beyond what she had planned. (Confession: I still want to buy her earrings.) She is about to embark on collaborations with Lesage and Petit Bateau. I think back to Getty telling me about the documents each designer brought with them for the judging – written theses and research that accompanied their final collections. “There would be a book or a video: there’s a lot of explaining. I’m so much more childish in my design approach, but the designers have proper mood boards of references and texts in such a scholarly way,” she said as she played with the rings on her fingers. “Sometimes I wished, in a way, that I could have seen the collection before having anyone explain it to me.” It grounds a line in Schindler’s email, which she wrote a day away from her first fully fledged show at Berlin fashion week. “This project is not only the research, but it makes so much more sense now – I am really excited about the fact that everything becomes real.”