For her first runway show since the pandemic, Véronique Leroy kept her collection close to home, all the while looking to the East.
The Belgian designer, who first presented in Paris in 1983, kept the continuity by using many of the same fabrics and techniques she used back then, such as wool, chunky knits and waterproof nylon.
At the same time, she went far afield for an injection of novelty in pattern. Leroy collaborated with the Li ethnic group from China’s Hainan province to use their traditional Lijin brocade and embroidery motifs. She reworked them a bit and blurred them, blew them up and shrunk them down, on sweaters, coats and column dresses.
For shapes, she stuck to the classics. “I prefer to read the same book 10 times. If I leave it and come back, every time I see it differently,” she said. “We always have a new eye because we are so influenced by what is happening and what surrounds us [at the current moment].”
To further this point, she transformed the silhouettes with precision, such as diamond-shaped shoulders and hip points that jutted from the body. On dresses this tailoring trick nipped the waist but did not add volume at the hips; on coats and dresses it added almost Elizabethan pouf and flounce to sleeves.
Leroy worked in a more muted pattern of chocolates and grays than is her wont, and the streamlined palette highlighted the print. Accessories were revisits of shapes past, including large spherical bracelets, left in their metallic state or covered in coordinating fabric.
The designer said she returned to the runway after five years simply because the time felt right, and she wanted to go deeper with this new collaboration than a film or book, which is how she has presented since the pandemic.
There were soft cushions, too, embroidered with the Lijin motifs, to comfort the weary fashion week flock on the last day of the week. It was all very soothing.
