Sandrine Philippe. UNDERDUST. Spring Summer 2022 – Paris.

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Images: www.sandrinephilippe.com

If one could call the peak of the Avant-garde fashion scene it would be, in my opinion, the year 2013, with its distressed leathers, artesian wares, asymmetrical cuts and unpicked stitching. Seen mostly as a black-on-black affair and its fusion of modernism and postmodernist aesthetics, defined in the late 1970s, attributed by the Japanese vanguard designers who descended on Paris such as Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, displaying their unique take on designer fashion as raw urban looks, yet also holding onto the reverence of natural environments. Which in turn four decades later, has ensured the beginning of an couture inspired showcase, revealing woretorn and weather beaten styles, while reflecting the enduring resilience to which these shrouded looks have portrayed over the years. Since the passing, as mentioned, peak of these Avant-garde styles, the effect on the fashion industry has been significant in respect to the many designers, brands and signature labels that have remained in 2021. However, it has been the Parisian designer Sandrine Philippe whose stalwartness as an Avant-garde designer which has set the benchmark to her forte; as one of the more prominent artisan fashion designers of the last 20 years.

Developing her signature label in 1998 Philippe’s inspired dark aesthetics and Avant-garde cues, with its German 1920s impressionist aspects, which was the bases of deconstructed modernism. She has also embraced a dystopian post-broken technological world, as a contemporary backdrop. Inspired by an idealism of the individual in her or his attempt to survive the turmoil that is both the external and internal, in its acceptance that when one rebels against the natural world, it is without burden. A detachment, while embracing the underground in all of its mediation within its urbanism, while the city, around us is crumbling. Yet, though the rubble we see an austere beauty.

For her Spring Summer 2022 collection UNDERDUST, the runway location was held in a crowdless alleyway, keeping in line with the industrial, back street and broken city landscape.   Philippe has ensured that her version of the Avant-garde trend of the last two decades has prevailed without compromising, the hand made and stitched garments to which she creates in limited ranges has served to represent the epitome of her artesian imprint.   UNDERDUST encapsulates a more stripped back, contoured and tailored style, whilst exhibiting her skills of melding silk and cottons, aligning with her trademark textured looks.  Also noted are the asymmetrical leather jackets with their futurist and dystopic pose, representative of the last ten years of Philippe’s renown backlog of designs.

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(A.Glass 2021)