Courtesy of Marine Serre.
At one point during the live stream for Marine Serre’s Spring/Summer 2020 show—held outdoors in the pouring rain this morning—the camera cut out. For several seconds, the screen went black, resuming in a torrent of jagged glitches. Somehow the brief power outage was befitting of a collection that felt like a jolt amidst the showy glitz and glamour of fashion month. As the models trooped down the pipeline runway, rain cascading down, a grey mist swirling overhead, it was impossible not to think: this is the future.
“We’re already finding ways in our everyday life to survive!” the French designer and former winner of the LVMH Prize said recently. “We have no choice but to adapt to violent climate change and political uncertainty, to look at what is already there and what we have created, and work out new ways to live, to eat, to move, to dress… “ This urgent forward thinking is what defines Serre’s approach to design—even after a few short years Paris-based Serre has established a number of style signatures (including her bodysuits, masks and of course, her crescent moon motif) and an environmentally conscious ethos. For her SS20 show, Serre re-introduced her hallmarks—moons studded leathers; a model slinked down the runway in a black catsuit embossed with a red stripe down the side; models swung spherical handbags resembling thuribles as in her Autumn/Winter collection; all manner of veils, hoods, masks and head coverings were wheeled out.
Courtesy of Marine Serre.
The title of the show, Marée noire, translates as “Oil Slick” in English, and the image of an unctuous, poisonous flood finds a potent counterpart in Serre’s collection. Like all of her work to date, Marée noire is dark and menacing. It doesn’t so much as anticipate apocalypse as much as it lives it—the opening look, a ballooning black cape dress was Handmaid’s Tale-esque in its modest severity; elsewhere a model—with a black Belgian Shepherd in tow—was ready for hard labour in industrial dungarees punctuated with exposed white stitching. As environmental activist Greta Thunberg reprimanded representatives of UN member states for stealing her dreams and her childhood with “their empty words” last night in New York, Serre’s firm grasp of doom seems all the more necessary.
But even in times of darkness there can still be a glimmer of poetry. As the models stepped back on to the runway in the final parade, Serre’s spectrum of colour—militaristic black outerwear fading into red tailoring, muddy browns merging with pearly creams and whites, bleeding into pale blue and faint florals, and a wash of yellow gold and turquoise at the end—suggested the mesmeric rainbow of an oil slick; a sliver of beauty in destruction.