Courtesy of Marine Serre.
For the past number of seasons, Parisian brand Marine Serre has become synonymous with two visual cues: a crescent moon motif and anti-pollution masks. In the wake of the spread of the coronavirus—or Covid-19 as it is now more accurately referred to as—the latter accessory assumes a profound weightiness. While Serre’s past three seasons have circulated around a vague sense of impending doom or apocalypse, the speculative doesn’t seem all that speculative any longer—at the time of publication, WHO has declared the outbreak to be a public health emergency of international concern, with 80,000 people infected by the virus worldwide.
The question of survival hung over Serre’s AW20 show. Against a whirring beat as the looks went by, a robotic voice asked: “The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.” In the few short years that Serre has been on the fashion week circuit, her collections have pivoted around an idea of survival: what’s next, what can we do? Lest not forget, this is a designer, whose most recent spring/summer collection was made of 50 percent upcycled materials and who refers to her garments as “FutureWear”; Serre has made sustainability not just cool and fashionable, but desirable.
Courtesy of Marine Serre.
For AW20, Serre took her vision up a notch, presenting her most grown-up and elegant collection to date with mid-calf dresses; big, billowing skirts; ankle-skimming outerwear; head-to-toe houndstooth, and covered-up everything. With the slick black leather looks and utilitarian-goth tendencies of her previous collection replaced with crushed magenta velvet, golden ochre brocades and zesty lime green accents, Serre seemed to be in a more optimistic mood this time around. Where she described her SS20 show as an “aftermath of an apocalypse”, her latest is more about finding ways to live and be in the world again after the dust has settled. Optimism is palpable in the way that garments are cobbled together, stitched and patchworked to make brand new wholes. Indeed, many of this season’s looks had a historic-tinge to them: in Serre’s hands old-fashioned high-necked silhouettes and feminine flounces are re-worked into garments that read equally as beautiful and visionary. Even after apocalypse, there is still the possibility of a new dawn.
There was no better way to say this than in her final look: two little girls in deep pink dresses, compiled of a bricolage of fabrics, and accessorised with miniature versions of Serre’s trademark solid spherical handbags. In the age of coronavirus and the possible threat of pandemic, not to mention the ceaseless fear over climate change, it would be easy to admit defeat, to throw in the towel for future generations. But somehow Serre sees a future: it may not be what we hoped for, or even what we thought it might be, but we can make our way through it—as the robotic voiceover says, “Survival is the ability to swim in strange waters.” It was no coincidence then that the really interesting part of this collection was the new motif that Serre has introduced into her repertoire: the lizard—a creature that has long been associated with its ability to shed its skin, to be reborn, revived and to resurrect.