“We don’t do quiet luxury,” Isabel Marant said at a recent preview of her fall 2024 collection. “We do unquiet luxury.” With that, Marant gave one of her glorious, throaty laughs. And you know what, she’s right. There hasn’t ever really been a place in the Marantverse for an austerely anonymous camel cashmere sweater, so polite and always minding its manners, never wanting to offend—boring—or some utterly minimal/severely plain/investment smugly written all over it black dressing gown coat that looks like a Mother Superior’s bathrobe. That said, at the end of the day, there is some crossover between quiet and unquiet, specifically the idea that whatever you buy into, it should stick around and last, because you loooove wearing it—and you want people to know that you loooove wearing it.
Which takes us back to Marant’s superb fall collection, which as she has done for some time now, was another she co-designed with artistic director Kim Bekker. Marant and Bekker pushed their fabrications perhaps further than they have ever done before. “There’s a lot of leather,” Marant said, “but at the same time, even though it’s quite luxurious, it’s also very easy and wearable.” There were great roomy 1980s inflected blouson jackets in shearling or leather, in olive, chocolate, or black, and because you can never have too much of a good thing, they often came worn with matching leather mini skirts, or lanky, leg lengthening pants.
And then, because you can really, really never have too much of a good thing, they used the suedes and leathers for scrunched boots resting on tiny heels, some of which came embellished with jewelry (you can add it or subtract it as you wish), or casual, effortless tooled suede bags swinging with fringe. Those boots and bags had a bit of a gaucho vibe. In fact, a lot of this collection did: With the short fringed sarape skirts; the blanket throw coats; the suede scarves wound around the neck; and—perhaps best of all—with a killer pair of black tasseled trousers which had been riveted with silver studs, and worn under a shrugged on black trench. Into this richly layered mix went chunky cable knit sweaters, rock ‘n’ roll leopard micro-print jeans, utilitarian jumpsuits and chore jackets, stacks of bangles, and a fantastic combo of a beige weathered cotton drill shirt, perfect in its slouchy proportions with a pair of equally weathered cotton trousers also cut with a slouchier attitude, frayed seams zig-zagging all over them.
If this all sounds like it really defines the Marantverse, correct, got it in one: The other thing she and Bekker did, said Marant, was that, “we wanted to go back to the roots of the brand.” Wise move. That’s the other thing: If you’re going to buy something with the expectation of it lasting, you want a piece of clothing that has the designer’s signature burnished into it. At the risk of sounding crazy, this might be the most Marant-Marant collection she has done in a while, not least, as Bekker pointed out, that it was, “important that we also made a statement about empowering women.” And it worked. Because, at a time when we’re (rightly) bemoaning the paucity of women designers in the business, it feels more vital than ever to be listening to those who have a crystal clear idea of who they are, and have the unquiet voice to tell us.