PARIS — Master students from the Institut Français de la Mode kicked off the women’s Paris Fashion Week season with a bang on Monday.
IFM students have opened the March women’s ready-to-wear shows in the French capital since 2021. This year, 23 students from 13 countries presented their creations, among which 11 were focused on knitwear and 12 on fashion design.
Their looks were bold, beautiful and diverse, homing in on subjects such as artificial intelligence, diaspora and girlhood. Fabric and craft ranged from raffia to sequins, bustles to intarsia.
Sidney Toledano, president of the IFM as well as an adviser to LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton chairman and chief executive officer Bernard Arnault, called the students’ work “so fresh, so creative and well-executed.”
He said sometimes there’s repetition in fashion collections at the big houses. “With all the means they have to do creativity,” Toledano said, “and they don’t take any risk.” Yet the young IFM students, who need to find jobs tomorrow, “they’re taking risk, but doing it perfectly,” Toledano continued.
Students were given carte blanche. “Each works on their own personal theme,” said Adam Jones, director of the IFM’s knitwear bachelor and master programs. “We push them to go very deep into the research, and then we put all the technical side at the service of the story they want to tell.”
Gašpar Marinič developed a collection called “R.I.P. Queer Cortege,” themed on how queer rights are being rescinded. Yousra Youssoufa’s designs channeled her idea that telesurveillance criminalizes Black people and those of other minorities.
Patrick Garvey said: “I put myself in the position of the alternative me.” If he hadn’t done fashion, Garvey wanted to be a scientist. So he experimented, making crystals grow on knits.
Students played with volumes and textures. Their fashion was showcased in white-walled spaces reminiscent of a contemporary art gallery.
A look by Dora Kapus.
Photo by Gregoire Avenel / Courtesy of Institut Français de la Mode
“Most of them were looking a lot into contemporary arts — whether music or sculpture or animation — questioning their practice as designers with regards to what the artists are going through, as well,” said Leyla Neri, director of the IFM master program. She said they’re all confronted with the arrival of technology, such as AI.
“All of them — like graphic designers, architects and artists — are asking: ‘Are we going to be necessary in the next decade? Are we going to have jobs? What are our jobs, our practice going to be?’ So instinctively they went into the arts and mixed that with the crafts and métiers d’art of haute couture, and they mixed the gestures of French heritage with these new AI possibilities, thanks to the research chair that we have with LVMH.”
Toledano remains upbeat about the future of the fashion industry. “The world is hopefully improving. Maybe not today, but for tomorrow,” he said. “The mission is a must: We have to work for [the students], prepare the future through creativity, new shapes, new mix of materials. With them, I am very optimistic.”
