On Message
YOUNG DESIGNER MARINE SERRE HAS GIVEN THE FASHION INDUSTRY A DYNAMIC PUSH WITH HER HYBRID GARMENTS, RADICAL MESSAGING AND DISTINCT VISION. IN TOWN TO LAUNCH HER CAPSULE COLLECTION FOR JOYCE HONG KONG, SHE TELLS ZANETA CHENG WHY FASHION IS NEVER JUST ABOUT GARMENTS BUT A CATALYST FOR CHANGE
Can fashion ever be more than just shallow, superficial ornamentation' It’s a question that the celebrated young designer Marine Serre answered “no” to for much of her childhood, but something changed when she turned 16.
What did she come to realise' “It’s the first way you express yourself,” Serre says. “-ven without talking, you can express yourself with fashion and I think that’s been quite important for me. I took some time to understand that fashion is not only about superficial image or making a skirt that’s just a skirt. I knew these things could mean more. But the question was how to make it work.”
Serre’s eventual answer took the fashion industry by storm almost two years ago, when the La Cambre graduate presented her first runway show, Manic Soul Machine, for autumn winter 2018. She’d just won Â300,000 from the 2017 L>MH 8rize for young fashion designers and hired a new team with whom she coined the term “futurewear”.
“My team and I would talk constantly about knitwear, footwear and outerwear, and I’d explain the way I worked, hybriding sportswear with AEougarments, and they’d tell me that the piece was neither dress nor pant, and was difficult to put in a box,” Serre explains.
“Then we decided, for fun, to call it futurewear, because it was simply a garment made for the future. With time, this joke became something concrete. And now, futurewear makes sense with the green line that we make entirely from upcycled material. So it just became something that means a lot to us.”
Serre consistently emphasises that she can’t make garments for the sake of it. -very piece she makes has meaning – “when we talk about what the garment of the future is, we’re not just talking about the garment, we’re talking about what our life is going to be.”
Her decision to upcycle is something she’s now especially lauded for, though the collection’s success can partly be attributed to Serre’s decision to explain the sustainability component only after the designs had been judged on their own merit. “Now, a lot of people are also trying to make business in the name of green fashion. For me it doesn’t make sense at all, to be honest,” she says. “My brand doesn’t work like that. I didn’t start it like that. For example, when I started the first show, Manic Soul Machine, I decided to do 30 percent upcycled materials because it was the maximum I could do at the time.
“At the first show, I showed everyone my collection and told nobody. 7nly after the show did I decide to talk about the fact that 30 percent was upcycled. What I wanted people to judge, or to think, or feel, was, »What’s she saying'’ – whether the garments are desirable, whether they speak to a new generation of people and the people today. I wanted to know if they would wear it, if they thought it was good. 7nly then would I say, »By the way, it’s upcycled.’ But I still wouldn’t ever want people to buy it because it’s recycled or because it’s green, I think this is bullshit. I think everyone should do it and everyone should think about this because we are all really going to disappear soon.
“It’s not so much about doing green,’ Serre adds. “What’s more important is how you transform, finding out what part of the system you can transform and taking what’s available to make something new. Because we need something new all the time. But the question is, »How do you produce newness'’ And that’s basically the question I’m trying to answer with the brand because, of course, I’m upcycling, but I’m also recycling and there are many ways today to answer that. I have one and it’s at the scale of my brand but I’m sure other brands could have other ways.”
Serre has built a following out of her climate-change and post-apocalyptic messages, but her brand has also been a change-maker among manufacturers. “Manufacturing was super tough in the beginning,” says Serre. “If you don’t have a lot of quantity, why should CmanufacturersE take the time to understand what you’re doing' To be honest, what I did was just go there myself and create a relationship with them and now they’ve continued to work with us and they like and support what we’re doing. It’s really great, because it ended up being a human relationship because they liked what I was doing so they took the risk.”
Humanity is at the core of the Marine Serre brand. Serre grew up in the countryside, where she was inspired by her grandfather, a collector and antiques dealer who instilled in her the value of seeing beauty in seemingly worthless items. “I wasn’t really a city person,” she says. “So everything was new to me when I started living in the city and my eyes would open wide at even the simplest things. It could be a little detail on a shoe or a little thing on an earring.
“Basically at some point, I’m targeting two or three things that are really important at the moment and that sometimes link to what is happening in the world – and they merge. Then I think about what the things I notice might mean. How do I make sense of it' And the more I dive into the collection, the more I’m trying to figure out what I want to say – and most of the time, what I want to say is linked with the way I’m making the garments.”
Serre’s past two collections are best viewed as a narrative – that of an apocalyptic world underground and then a post-apocalyptic world when humans come out of hiding and back into the daylight.
Her autumn winter 2019 collection, Radiation, was shown in a wine cellar deep in 8arisian suburbia. “It was quite dark,” she recalls. “It’s a hard time. It was hard for me and it’s hard for everyone today. We’re in a weird state today where we’re like zombies – not knowing exactly where to go. Radiation is dark, of course, but I’m still someone who carries hope – always – otherwise I wouldn’t be here, I’d hide in my room. The invitation then was really to just get everybody together in a super-dark zone underground and be together.
“The collection was really a kind of transformative evolution. -verything was about the skin so it was almost like skin painting. So first you have the jeans, a pink denim look, and she was a little normal. The looks following the denim became a little more weird, a bit fantastic and the third one was totally covered, which spoke to our question of what the future might be like. And that look was really me thinking, what is the couture piece of the apocalypse' What will the world be like post-apocalypse' And I decided on a really dark look, as though she was rising out of the sea covered in shells, keys and chains as though this strange imaginary person was coming from the future but at the same time she could also have come from really far into the past. So I played with that. You don’t know what time she’s from.”
Although Serre defies categorisation when it comes to creating hybrid garments, she’s especially particular about the way her brand is organised. Marine Serre carries four lines. The white line features the everyday garments that have become the hallmark of the brand – think the crescent moon motif of the Marine Serre cult. Then there’s the green line in which all the clothes are created through upcycling. The gold line is experimental, while the red line presents unique couture pieces that can be made of anything, from shells or upcycled fishing jackets to blankets.
“I think these four lines are very important for me,” Serre explains. “First, because I want to be clear – and I know it’s always only an attempt at being clear – but I really like people who are taking the time to make things clear, and I think it’s also really good today to try to be clear with people in whatever you do. I’m a little bit tired of the unknown, aren’t you'”