Vanessa Seward has been providing style inspiration since her Azzaro days in the early 2000s. I can’t be the only one who remembers Nicole Kidman and Carey Mulligan in her crystal-lined LBDs, or Kate Moss in a strapless satin bow-front jumpsuit.
Born in Argentina and raised in London, Seward is one of Paris’s chicest women, with stacked heel boots of the kind Gena Rowlands might’ve worn in a 1970s Cassevetes movie and the same covetable bouncy coiffure, only hers is a deep, chocolatey brunette. She’s so chic she published a book on the subject, La Guide de la Gentlewoman, in 2022, a sort of how-to for those of us a little lacking in the je ne sais quoi department—moi included.
High rise jeans and a velvet evening bag from Seward’s mid-2010s eponymous brand, launched with the support of A.P.C.’s Jean Touitou and sadly short-lived, hang in my closet to this day, and I still haunt The RealReal looking for a pair of her timeless boots (if anyone out there is ready to sell, I’m a size 40). But my resale days might be over, at least temporarily: She’s designed a fall capsule for Bonpoint, in what is the French baby and children’s wear company’s first designer collaboration for women.
News of the collaboration, when my colleagues at Vogue Business announced it, came as a bit of a surprise. These days, Seward is more focused on her painting, which graduated from a Covid past time to a passion when she started showing the work in galleries in 2021. Having started with sublime self-portraits and images of her daughter Jacqueline, she’s moved onto film icons like Isabella Rosselini and Ornella Muti, as well as paintings of her own close friends.
“Since I started doing the portraits, I’ve still wanted to work in fashion, but it had to be more obvious, more organic than before. I do feel now that things have to make sense,” she says. And make sense this project does. The collection includes familiar Vanessa Seward signatures like softly belted dresses for day and night, a flannel pantsuit with a frill-neck blouse, a long peacoat with shiny gold buttons, and a pair of must-have black sequin pants that she likes to wear in high-low fashion with a patch pocket denim button-down neatly tucked in.
Seward is a long-time Bonpoint shopper, and not only because of her daughter. “I used to buy the 16-year-old pieces in the ’90s when I was working at Chanel,” she says. “They were simple, but very good quality, and you could sort of mix it up with more high-fashion pieces. At that time there wasn’t much choice, so that was one of the kinds of tricks you had: buy Bonpoint and have some nice, classic pieces which weren’t too expensive.”
Photo: Courtesy of Bonpoint
One thing it’s not is a mommy-and-me collection. “I wanted it to be a bit funky, to have a fresh sexiness about it,” she says, though she did put some shorter pieces in the collection for her daughter and her friends. “There’s not much for teenagers [out there],” she says, echoing moms I know from Paris to New York, where the tyranny of Brandy Melville has turned girls into cropped tank top and denim cut-offs-wearing clones.