Mona Lisa, meet Marine Serre. As Paris fashion week gets underway, the designer beloved for her crescent moon motif and her dexterity with upcycled materials has opted out of a runway show while revealing an exciting collaboration with none other than the Louvre. From an initial conversation with the museum around a year ago, she realized five outstanding creations that further attest to her imagination and resourcefulness.
A black gown was fully covered with nearly 500 small brush heads (an unused supply of makeup brushes), resulting in an uncanny surface like hairy fish scales. Serre designed a bustier minidress of smashed-up paint tubes that entailed 240 hours of work, and another dress strung together from the backs of watch faces as a kind of chainmail. A “Flemish Painter’s Dress” put a modern spin on a historical silhouette by splicing a black scuba-style top with a pouf skirt made from painter’s shirts. Look closely at her La Joconde dress and you will see it is a giant molded puzzle; each piece was moistened and embroidered with color-corresponding thread so that, 420 hours later, it became a wearable silhouette. And yes, the pieces dovetail perfectly with the Met Gala theme, “Fashion is Art.”
“What I am known for, and what is typical for Marine Serre, is to create couture from things that have no value, and that’s also the link I like between what I do and painting: it’s not the paint that costs a lot, but rather the time that you pass through painting,” she said. “Here, we spent a lot of meditative time in the atelier.”
Hence the name of Serre’s main collection, The Grace of Time, which she arrived at by considering what makes clothing timeless. Her lookbook played out like a portrait series with each personage named, positioned and/or propped as though riffing on classical tableaux. Yet within them were clothes that are thoroughly contemporary, whether a tank top integrated with a shirt worn open as a layered trompe l’œil; a black top with a dimensional portrait collar or “aura” as she described it; or a commercial version of the Flemish dress, the skirt’s volume owing to T-shirts built up around the waist.
Amidst photos propped with fruits and flowers, dogs and cats, there was wardrobe catnip aplenty: a leather ensemble with embossed moons and a faux fur “shawl” encircling the shoulders; a denim jacket with historical sleeves and corset seams; denim paneled in artful tapestry (these will vary from one piece to the next); and Serre’s signature jersey cut up into pompom cuffs on an LBD with sheer incrustations (“La Bourgeoise”). Although slightly hard to see, the portrait titled “La Providence” was a standout; the draped mesh in her signature monogram and inky blue, slinky dress tracing the lower bust line like a bodice only without any constriction.
“It’s really important to make beautiful pieces that a woman recognizes herself in, but it’s far more complicated to do a new thing in ready-to-wear than in couture,” said Serre, acknowledging that the work for this collection was especially time-intensive. The designer said she learned that Leonardo da Vinci took several decades to paint Mona Lisa’s clothing, adjusting details to reflect the era. Five hundred years later and nine years into her brand, Serre is thinking of the long arc of her clothing beyond her material ingenuity. “I am trying to have no temporality in what I’m doing. Like, imagine this in five years, it will still work,” she said. “If you are a good designer, that’s what you should want.”