Dear Shaded Viewers,
Fashion Week opened with one of its most anticipated names. Victor Weinsanto presented Après Minuit and delivered exactly what the room had come for: campiness wielded with intent. For more than five years, Weinsanto has amused us with gleefully sexy garments that never mistake provocation for substance. After a notably mature collection last fall, he demonstrated something rarer still for a young designer: continuity with surprise.
Corsets remain central to his universe, but they have evolved. Here, they shape without imprisoning women of all body types strut through them with visible joy. The brass pieces by Damien Mouliérac push further still, their irregular forms lending each silhouette something lyrical, almost improvised.
The breadth of the wardrobe seduces through sheer multiplicity of innuendo. Après Minuit evokes urban danger, and the clothes follow suit: sweatshirts alongside gowns, the street become ceremony.
The collection’s most compelling thread remains Weinsanto’s vision of urban femininity : black and pink, roughness turned regent. Legendary model Sonia Rolland walked in a sculptural hairstyle and a dress bearing serigraphic traces: raw, graphic, and quietly monumental. A modern princess, she linked fashion’s past and present to suggest something about its future : that playfulness, deployed seriously, belongs to everyone.
Then the show shifted register entirely. Acrobat Julie Demont descended a staircase, her commanding silhouette swathed in an enormous black coat. Dancer Mimi met her at the bottom, and what followed left the room suspended: a charged, sulfurous cruising duet that made the clothes feel suddenly alive in a different way.
The rough edges of Weinsanto’s urban sensibility surfaced in the details too. Kevin Jacotot’s hairstyles : small dyed sections, pinched braids , reinforced the collection’s central contradiction: tenderness with edge, royalty in the street, people of entirely different worlds sharing the same night.
Later
Mael Heinz
