Emerging Designers Spotlight Unique Materials at LVMH Prize Showroom

PARIS – Plastic grapes, old televisions and Victorian pipes were just some of the materials used by emerging designers presenting their creations at the LVMH Prize showroom during Paris Fashion Week. 

From a wood veneer dress by Julie Kegels to a jacket made of vintage buttons by Act N.1’s Luca Lin, material experiments ruled at the event held on the glass-roofed top floor of Paris department store La Samaritaine, surrounded by an Art Nouveau peacock mural.

“It’s so inspiring. I feel really grateful to be amongst artists,” said Anya Taylor-Joy, the ambassador of this year’s edition, who was wearing a colorful asymmetric jacquard peplum jacket hot off the Dior runway the day before. 

What struck her was “the ingenuity, whilst also being connected to roots or to something that goes beyond this plane. A lot of the designers are talking about the world before something becomes real or the world of the past, and it feels like they are trying to bridge these two worlds together.” 

While the actress said it was impossible to choose favorites, “I’m very, very excited to be reaching out to a couple of them.” Taylor-Joy has two major movies coming out later this year, as the voice of Princess Peach in “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” and in “Dune: Part Three.”

Delphine Arnault, the force behind the prize and a key talent scout at luxury conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, was just discovering the looks in person, after casting a global net in the search for the next promising fashion talents. For the first time, the selection included designers from Georgia, Kenya and Thailand.

“Every year, the level just keeps getting better,” she marveled, noting that several of the designers have experience working for major houses.

De Pino founder Gabriel Figueiredo freelances for Dior, while Harry Pontefract, the artistic director of Ponte, works alongside Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela’s Artisanal haute couture division. Luke Derrick, meanwhile, logged stints at Dunhill, Brioni and Alexander McQueen before launching his menswear brand Derrick in 2021. 

“I always find it fascinating to see their inspirations, to understand what moves them,” said Arnault, who is chairman and chief executive officer of Christian Dior Couture. “There’s less genderless fashion, much less sportswear. Instead, it’s really about fine materials, great cuts, craftsmanship and know-how. A lot of things are handmade.”

At an evening cocktail party, guests who stopped by to mingle and check out the collections of the 20 seminfinalists of the competition included Pharrell Williams, the multihyphenate musician, producer and men’s creative director of Louis Vuitton, Gabriela Hearst, and Loewe creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez.

“I’m always very excited to see young designers, because the future is theirs,” said Hearst. “We were all young brands once upon a time.” 

She was particularly intrigued by Thevxlley designer Daniel del Valle’s top made with Victorian pipes individually hand-dredged from the Thames. “They’re absolutely incredible,” she enthused. 

Hearst was impressed by the level of craft on display. “Anyone that is doing the elements of craft is really important for me,” she said. “It’s the duty of designers today to preserve craft. It matters to use our hands.”

Hernandez and McCollough, preparing for their sophomore show at the helm of Loewe, had some words of advice for young designers. 

“It takes courage; follow your guts,” Hernandez said. “You’ve got to believe it. If you don’t believe, no one else will. We had it a bit easier, there was less competition, less designers when we started — now it’s a crowded field.”

Guests also included Sidney Toledano and Jean-Paul Claverie, advisers to LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault and members of the LVMH Prize jury, as well as Dior creative and image director of makeup Peter Philips, and Pucci’s artistic director Camille Miceli.

Arnault explained the event moved from its usual location because LVMH’s headquarters on Avenue Montaigne are under renovation. “We chose La Samaritaine partly because it belongs to the group, but also because the place itself is absolutely spectacular,” she said.

“We’re fortunate to have this amazing weather — it brings a different energy,” she said of the venue, which was drenched in sunlight earlier in the day. “Maybe in future we’ll continue to move it around.”

Here are five brands competing for the prize that are getting creative in the quest for new materials and craftsmanship.

Thevxlley by Daniel del Valle

A former florist, Daniel del Valle brings an obsession with botanics to everything he touches. Among the one-of-kind pieces he showed under his label, Thevxlley, was a ceramic bust overgrown with orchids, which he leaned down to spritz with water every once in a while. 

“It’s like a living sculpture, in a way. There are almost 10 different species of orchids growing in here, and it’s been growing for over a year now, so it’s been crazy to see the process of it and how it keeps changing over time,” he said. 

A porcelain vase bust, an hourglass display case filled with miniature vases, and a mosaic T-shirt depicting a still life were some of the other pieces of wearable art the Spanish designer created over the space of three years, and unveiled last month as part of his debut runway show at London Fashion Week.

Del Valle works out of a tiny home studio, and dreams of expanding his practice. For example, he spent a week with a glass artist in Barcelona to make a skirt that resembles bathroom tiling. 

“Each piece is a different technique, because I like the experimentation of working with different materials,” he explained. “I haven’t studied art or design, and my way of learning is getting into the field until I get it.”

Iamisigo by Bubu Ogisi

Born in Nigeria, raised in Ghana and living in Kenya, Bubu Ogisi sees material as a global language.

“The brand started purely based on material research, but through the concept of borderless ideologies — so how different materials exist across borders, and how people interact and utilize this based on cultural hybridization or ancestral memory,” she said.

Among her creations were handblown glass handbags and rings made from reclaimed TV screens, bottles and window panes; a coat covered in bagasse, the fibrous byproduct of tequila production; and a bag woven from the plastic bindings of recycled clothing bales.

Ogisi said it typically takes her several days to piece together a metallic dress like the one worn by Naomi Campbell for Victoria’s Secret The Tour campaign. 

“When things take a lot of time for me, I see it as a meditational process too,” she said. “It also allows me to relax, because I have a lot of anxiety, so a lot of things I have to do with hand detailing sort of calm me.”

The brand produces hats in South Africa and shoes in Nigeria, while weaving is spread across Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Togo and Benin. “It’s just about, how do we create this unison through matter, and how do we bring all these things together to create one piece of magic,” Ogisi said. 

Ponte by Harry Pontefract

A lifelong hoarder of found objects, Harry Pontefract’s work is all about subverting expectations — whether a dress made from plastic grapes, a beanbag T-shirt or a metallic dress fashioned out of copper foil tape used by plumbers.

“A lot of the brand is taking things and recomposing them in another context,” said Bryan Conway, cofounder and design director of the Ponte label.

“The material comes first. It’s absolutely everything,” he added. “Either it’s so special that it’s incredible and rare and scarce, or it’s the thing that is everywhere and no one cares about, and then we make something with that.”

He and Pontefract met while studying fashion design at the University of Westminster in London, and both have worked with Jonathan Anderson: Pontefract at Loewe, and Conway at JW Anderson. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute bought eight pieces from the brand’s last collection. Ponte has kept distribution deliberately small, with only six stockists worldwide. 

“We have our stores because we want it still to be real and have clothes in those stores, but we want to build up more selling directly,” Conway said. “The singular works, we will sell to collectors.”

Nong Rak by Teerapat Phuangfueang and Cherry W. Rain-Phuangfueang

Bangkok-based husband-and-wife team Teerapat Phuangfueang and Cherry W. Rain-Phuangfueang started out as vintage resellers before launching their own label in 2021. 

Specializing in knitwear, Nong Rak — which means “little love” in Thai — specializes in colorful mohair pieces made with vintage yarns. “We have tried to use modern mohair, and the quality is never the same,” Cherry said. 

Aside from a collaboration with Marc Jacobs’ streetwear line Heaven, their business has been direct-to-consumer, informing many of their creative choices. The duo just opened their first boutique in Bangkok, and are expanding into cut-and-sew pieces made with Thai silk. 

“Opening the shop has completely changed our world after multiple years of just being online,” Cherry said.

“Clothing is so emotional and it holds history and it holds feeling, so we love to talk to everybody and see how they’re feeling and get the feedback,” she said. “I think people have been really connecting with our stuff, because at its heart, we want to have fun, and we want other people to have fun.”

Kinyan Lam

An expert in natural dyes, Kinyan Lam launched his Hong Kong-based label in 2023 with the aim of preserving centuries-old textile techniques.

With the help of textile artisan Hanna Li, he’s building a network of artisans in the Guizhou province of southern China and cataloguing techniques, with the aim of sharing them back with local communities. 

“We’re trying to preserve them because some of the crafts are fading away, because the new generation are not willing to learn them. That’s why we think we should bring it back to the market,” he explained.

Items from his latest collection feature appliqué embroidery, chain stitching and indigo-dyed Dong cloth that give each piece a unique, handmade feel. 

“We exist to prove that true luxury is not a price tag, but a commitment to honesty, time, and the irreplaceable human touch,” the brand said in its mission statement.