Ann Demeulemeester Spring 2024 - Paris Fashion Week.

(Images:  Ann  Demeulemeester 2023)

I had been reviewing Ann Demeulemeester show's for nearly ten years, and stopped reviewing the iconic Avant-garde brand when Sébastien Meunier left the label as creative director after his Fall 2020 showing at Paris Fashion Week.  It was since acquired by the Italian apparel conglomerate New Guards Group, under the watchful eye of businessman Claudio Antonelli, who was solely responsible for the overhyped Off-White label to gain prominence into the Chinese markets.  Meunier for me, was that quintessential romantic designer, who crafted fellow Belgium, Ann Demeulemeester's vision of her Byronic Avant-garde into the 21st Century.  And he did a magnificent job in his respectful homage to Demeulemeester, who retired in 2013.  With precision fits and flowing styles, Meunier accentuated the signature label with its recognisable gothic aesthetic.

Like most material aspects of our culture, we can be haunted by ghosts of the past, metaphor or not.  If we don't clear away the restless spirits, one can become entangled within their suffering.  Let them pass on.  And the label Ann Demeulemeester maybe suffering from the haunts of the past, and in all of its irony of traversing between the timelines of the 1900s and 1970s bohemian looks, after Ann Demeulemeester's retirement ten years ago, the label probably should have been put to rest.  Now in the hands of a corporate entity, Ann Demeulemeester's brand name has churned through, after Meunier's ten year tenure, creative teams who had hastily put together Ann Demeulemeester's Fall 2021 collection without a long term creative director.  Antonelli then hired once Rick Owens model and young fashion designer Ludovic de Saint Sernin, who lasted for only one collection, debuting for Ann Demeulemeester's Fall 2023 collection, that by its standard, was actually a worthwhile debut for De Saint Sernin, yet he exited the brand after just six months.  Testament, to when a brand name tries to reinvent itself, without folding, on disturbed foundations, and begins to have creative directors leave in short durations, that label itself could be holding a curse.  Unless it is ritually cleared.  

Twenty Seven year old Stefano Gallici, who is part of the Antonelli New Guards Group, designated as its menswear designer, is the new creative director for Ann Demeulemeester, debuting his Spring 2024 collection at Paris Fashion Week.  But, unfortunately even with a obscure venue location and the apparent long wait time for the show to begin, to which the audience languished in near total darkness, the collection is certainly pale in comparison to the legacy of Ann Demeulemeester's template.  

Gallici's reset after De Saint Sernin, has leaned more towards a rushed version of the drapey, asymmetrical styles of Avant-garde, to which, when Demeulemeester was one of the many contributors of the now fledgling trend that petered out in 2019.  The styles for his Spring 2024 collection are very much backdated and some ways an amateurish affair, without the necessary respect to the androgynous romanticism and poetic devil-may-care stylization, which Meunier gave to Ann Demeulemeester over the many years.  And as mentioned, if one does not offer an acknowledgment of past endeavours, within its necessary release to move onto the new, then we maybe cursed in all its turmoil of the now.

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(A.Glass 2023)