Love it or hate it, Le Connétable is one of Paris’s favorite après-hours bars. I am personally undecided on this spot- when I was 19 a man the splitting image of Cary Grant drove me here in a 1950’s Citroën, we kissed in the basement for hours. My last visit lasted one very long courageous hour, swatting away drunk Frenchmen like flies, begging the bartender for a Diet Coke. Another man standing in line for the show puts it best- It’s kind of fashion kids, and then like, total alcoholics. As is most of Paris this week. The show starts fashionably late, and I have ample time to eavesdrop on guests recounting drunken debauched evenings spent here. In any case, someone on the Andraschko team had an idea, and with its red lit plastic chandeliers, low wood beam ceilings and taxidermy decor, this is the perfect place to host Laura Andraschko’s layered, epicurean Après-Ski.
The collection is a playful and sumptuous story that embraces both sleazy and refined notions of girlhood and sensuality, playing on innocent and animalistic. Her looks unfold to envelope her audience in the fantasy of a well-funded chalet weekend. And while distinctly feminine and sexy, Andraschko’s perspective is definitely from the female-gaze and for the female-gaze. Deconstructed mid-century silhouettes meet early-aughts proportions, punctuated by campy tailoring and styling. The thread of hedonism throughout reveals itself in romantic delicate pieces contrasted with leather, lederhosen, and fur. Models strut down the runway with Dutch braids, round red pouty lips, legs for miles. Andraschko also quite cleverly plays on the idea of resort branded merch which gives the collection a very marketable accessibility. If we don’t see those ruffled Après-Ski bloomers on SSENSE soon, someone somewhere isn’t doing their job very well.
Andraschko’s talent for fantasy narrative is so strong that all of the sudden I find myself daydreaming of laying naked on a bear skin rug in front of a crackling fireplace. Snow is falling outside, a Skarsgård (any) wearing a silk robe (or nothing) walking towards me…
À toute,
Rianna
