What do Ann Demeulemeester and Dolly Parton have in common? It sounds like a setup. But Sébastien Meunier showed that there’s more to mine in that association than anyone would ever have guessed. Surprisingly, it actually stood up.
A few months back, Meunier caught the American singer Lingua Ignota—née Kristin Hayter—in concert in Antwerp. The designer described her cover of the Parton classic “Jolene” as a kind of a bolt from the blue: He knew he had the music baseline for his Spring collection. “This woman is Jolene,” the designer said backstage, referring to the song’s lyrics about a femme fatale. For her part, Ignota canceled a concert to attend the show.
Demeulemeester fans will follow the brand to the ends of the earth. This season, that meant a hulled-out civil engineering building on the southernmost hem of Paris with, a spokesman whispered, seven underground levels for nuclear data storage.
The many who made the trek were rewarded with an unexpected take on Demeulemeester’s signature aesthetic, one that Meunier described as more in his own image—slicker, sleeker, grittier, and certainly glossier than the wispy, wistful romance of recent women’s collections. Not that the Spring collection was without nostalgia: The mostly black and white lineup blended punk with references to the years Meunier spent cutting his teeth at Jean Colonna and Maison Martin Margiela in the ’90s, spliced with signatures from Demeulemeester’s own heyday. To wit: a re-edition, 25 years on, of her classic cut-out, “bird claw” boots, their curved heels newly elongated to 10 centimeters thanks to tech borrowed from the automobile industry.
That footwear was the foil for what Meunier described as “almost animal” cuts that curved high on the thigh, with layers of cut-out panels buttoned, perforated, or intermittently stitched together to highlight the body in movement. Razor-cut vinyl bandeaux, with or without a train; coats as glossy as an oil slick, and fishnet or lace camisoles layered with tank dresses added up to a look Meunier described as “enigmatic and more dangerous.” “Trench coats and shirts open up in surprising places,” the show notes specified, laying out a studied counterpoint to the romance of Meunier’s much-praised men’s collection for Spring. It will be interesting to see how that all plays out in stores.
