“With all this talk about quiet luxury, we’ve forgotten what dressing up feels like,” said Co’s Stephanie Danan, on Zoom from a lively Paris street corner. With every other designer pivoting to “wardrobing,” Danan said that this season she was going against the concept. “We wanted this to be like a coup de coeur, which in French is like an emotional buy. This is about attitude and great clothes.” Her lookbook images drive home the “emotional” part, with her cast of three different models of different ages—one of them the actor Elodie Bouchez. “They’re all women who are confident, and who style things in this very ‘I own my shit kind of way’.”
Among the pieces in the collection that feel like an absolute necessity to this writer, who also “owns her shit,” aer an enormous trench coat with linebacker shoulders, and a pinstripe skirt suit, both with an extra asymmetrical panel that gives the appearance of two pieces being layered on top of each other, and a red leather A-line skirt worn over a matching stretch wool pencil skirt and a bodysuit with a built-in scarf. The built-in scarf is one of the Co’s signature motifs this season; it also appears on a gorgeous double-faced cashmere coat, an opulent fil coupé dress, and on a simple bodysuit, which was styled with the collection’s most perfectly unhinged piece—a pair of baggy sweatpants with a “layered” basketball-style wide short in a “parachute kind of fabric.”
“We loved the idea of mixing sportswear with more conservative pieces that felt very fancy,” Danan added. “There’s no clear throughline here, it’s a sportswear pant with a bodysuit with a fringed scarf attached to it, like what’s going on here? This woman’s very free.”