The young Belgian designer Marie Adam-Leenaerdt is working her way through the building blocks of a woman’s wardrobe. Her season-one collection was devoted to “office wear” and her second to “holiday clothes.” The show she put on today was devoted to the skirt. If a quick glance at these photos suggests otherwise, that’s because Adam-Leenaerdt is a process oriented designer, and a bit of a pattern obsessive too. Her idea was to test the skirt’s versatility and to explore its possibilities.
There were a couple of midi-length skirts that she also showed as trapeze dresses, the waistband slipping asymmetrically off a bare shoulder; coats whose collars looked more like waistbands; and bags of all sizes designed with horizontal zips—remove the middle sections and guess what they look like? “Skirt skirt, dress skirt, coat skirt, bag skirt,” is how she put it on her press notes. Even the wedding dress finale was constructed simply, like a skirt with hoops that gave it its tenting volume.
This kind of project can go badly wrong, but Adam-Leenaerdt’s cuts are store-ready. Her choice of venue, an empty Kookai store in Paris’s 6th Arrondissement, might have been chosen to make that point. Backstage she reported that she picked up 10 new accounts last season, including Bergdorf Goodman, Dover Street Market, Blake Chicago.
And it wasn’t all skirts or skirt-adjacencies. The padded down coats with built-in scarves were statement making, especially in bright red. And for pants-loving women, she had smart-looking straight leg trousers, which she paired with tailored jackets with button plackets that stick out on the perpendicular instead of laying flat against the torso. Adam-Leenaerdt isn’t making a lot of noise yet, but for those who are interested in the fine details of tailoring, and invest in them, she could be a stealth asset.