Pierre Renaux photographed by Maxime Ballesteros for Sleek.
Croissants, apple juice and a hundred words a minute await us as we arrive at young deisgner Pierre Renaux’s flat, located just minutes away from Antwerp’s renowned fashion school, where he has just completed his MA. Renaux is excited, chatty and can’t wait to tell us about his stunning graduate collection “Liquidation Totale” so we’re quite surprised when he says: “I have an obsession called sleeping. During the day though. I don’t like to see people outside and I don’t like to deal with my daily affairs. The French fashion designer Claude Montana said ‘I suck up the energy of all people sleeping at night.’ And that is quite similar to how I feel.”
This young Frenchman is seemingly also obsessed with morbid one-liners. As I hone in on the sketches of his collection that line the walls of his living room I discover neatly written one-liners next to each look: “Kill Your Problems”, “My therapists committed suicide”, “Elle on Earth” and “Dress to Depress”. When we ask him about these he exclaims: “I’m a one-liner kind of guy. I design for women and women of few words have to be strong. These lines help give each silhouette an atmosphere of ironic despair.”
Read more about Pierre Renaux and Sleek’s trip from berlin to London via Amsterdam and Antwerp in the next issue of Sleek, publishing next month. Find out more information on The Search at mb! von Mercedes-Benz.