Dear Shaded Viewers,
Every office worker knows a private fantasy: the meeting runs long, the tide is perfect, and the tie could simply be left behind. J.SIMONE builds a whole collection on the most compromising moment of that fantasy, the car park. It is a hurried, half-naked instant, with a towel held up as a flimsy wall of modesty and one leg already in the wetsuit.
At SO/ Paris, the House took over the rooftop of Bonnie and turned the Paris skyline into a seaside horizon. The setting is fitting. A rooftop is already a place of exposure, suspended between the city’s rules and the open sky. The 1970s surf culture that inspires the collection also understood the body as a form of expression. It was a golden age of radical boards shaped in the image of their riders, in bold colors and free-form patterns.
What interests me is the threshold. The collection sits in the in-between, when you choose, almost by instinct, what to show and what to hide. Nobody stages this moment. It is urgent and a little embarrassing, and that is why it is erotic. Undressing for the sake of undressing is theatre. Undressing because the waves are calling is desire.
The wardrobe follows this logic. The surf T-shirt stretches into a dress and is knotted with a tie, as if the office refuses to let go of the body entirely. The towel, that accomplice of improvised changes, leaves the beach and becomes a garment, wrapped around the skin as both shelter and invitation. Uniform and escape, modesty and exposure, everyday life and freedom: the boundaries blur, and the clothes seem quite content there.
The surf iconography is handled with a sense of humour. Shark teeth, hibiscus, palm trees, surf wax and bodysurfing fins are reimagined into an offbeat “surf starter pack”, partly a joke and partly a fetish catalogue.
J.SIMONE leaves the corporate everyday on the shore and asks us to drift out to sea. After all, the most persuasive argument for quitting a job is a very well-cut dress that unwraps like a towel.
