The name Enfants Riches Déprimés, Rich Depressed Children in English, may send eyes heavenward, a reflex the luxury industry has little right to, since it still courts this very crowd on bended knee. Tiptoe around its literal sense and the provocation turns confession, privilege owning up to its gloom. Creative director Henri Alexander Levy studied fine art at UCLA before founding the House in 2012. This season, he returns to Christie’s, where in 2017 the runway wound through rooms hung with his own canvases. Now, works by the Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies, from his foundation, frame a gallery of characters whose neuroses wear refined tailoring, cut sharp.
A young Miles Davis inspires the narrow, sharp tailoring. Long ivory jacquard, marked by a pale blue sash lettered “Enfant de Marie”, meets its opposite in a glossy black leather dress, square shouldered, a knife in hand. Yet the staged, elitist nihilism of the House’s DNA lives on for instance in a smudged denim ensemble, an everyday uniform that wears its ruin on purpose. Burgundy leather shorts, emblazoned in Hebrew with the Coca-Cola script, sit under a frilled blouse with a scalloped plastron. The alternation measures the distance travelled toward a far more accomplished fashion proposal.
Studious youths wear a pink shirt and slim brown tie under a stained, cropped beige jacket. A camel knit over a pointed collar pairs with trousers in supple leather, one leg dark and smooth, the other brown and weathered, a notebook stamped with the brand’s initials in hand. A family in strict clothes shares the room. A silver haired collector, in a cream blazer pinned at the lapel over a navy cardigan, trousers darned at the knee, carries a framed picture. The monochrome head of the household, austere in a high buttoned shirt and a cummerbund, cuts the air in a vast cape and closes the collection on its most finished form.
This stronger, more desirable collection arrives months after a show that Marilyn Manson opened and raised criticism over the abuse allegations he denies. Presented off the official calendar, away from the frenzy, this world apart irritates those who are neither among the rare few invited nor able to afford the pieces, or who refuse an assumed elitism that nonetheless feeds so many.
