Lanvin Spring 2023 Ready-to-Wear

This summer, Lanvin announced a “reset” focused on aligning its directions for women’s and menswear, and building a contemporary wardrobe for both customers. In the process, the house wants to turn down the volume on the opulence it had been amplifying in recent seasons, and settle for a more subdued glamour. That was illustrated in a pre-collection “overseen” by artistic director Bruno Sialelli in July, but today’s main collection felt more like his definitive—and more personal—proposal for Lanvin’s new market plan. “In the past, we introduced my vision for daywear. Then, we introduced the eveningwear. Now we want to express the idea that we can accompany our audience on a full-day occasion,” he said in a preview.

There were two sides to the collection Sialelli showed in L’Atelier des Lumières, a former foundry on Rue Saint-Maur, the walls of which he bathed in projections of poetic footage created by the film-maker Joshua Woods. On the narrative side, we were on holiday somewhere between the desert of Marrakech and the coast of Casablanca: yellow and blue coats and miniskirts constructed in shiny eel skin, seaweed-shaped embroideries on jackets, and knitted robes de style that bounced like jellyfish. On the technical side, we were between the pristine and the deconstructed: pristine coats, shorts and mini-skirts frayed at the hems, macramé tops meticulously but coarsely handcrafted in silk tubing, crispy cotton dresses, and stone-washed satin coats that played to the same contrast.

Transparent cloqué coats and suits and some of the more prettified robes de style considered, “subdued” would probably be overstating the evolution. But Sialelli did clarify his proposition. Gone were the animated prints, wild art deco ornamentations, and ballroom gestures of previous seasons. In their place, he turned to an earthy palette energized with hits of electric blue and orange, and materials—such as those eel coats, or the plumage that adorned path-clearing ballerinas—that were naturally graphic rather than artificially or animatedly so. Amongst the more complex proposals were some nice options for luxurious tailoring: clean enough to be timeless and sculpted enough to push past pre-collection territory.