LGN Louis Gabriel Nouchi RTW Fall 2024
Show us the green, the dough, the brass. It was all about money at LGN Louis Gabriel Nouchi, from coins on each seat to the gutted former bank where he held his fall show Wednesday.
After alighting on male sensuality, savagery and sensitivity in seasons past, the Parisian designer considered social status.
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The lightning rod of the season was the 19th-century novel “Bel-Ami,” where Guy de Maupassant chronicles the rise of a social-climbing journalist.
“It’s a reflection about suits and how for men, when you rent a suit, people look at you differently,” Nouchi told WWD at a preview. “The way we express exterior signs of wealth and opulence in clothing.”
He reached for the sartorial glossary of male eveningwear, mining tuxedos and dinner suits as much for their structure as for their materials.
Satin became a high-gloss leather and he evoked furs by replicating its lush texture interpreted as jacquards, including a hairy fil coupé. Applied to the marked shoulders and snatched waist silhouette he favors, it made the collection walk a tightrope between serious and seamy.
Details that played on bling included penny loafers and brogues with slits filled with oversized coins, courtesy of an LGN hookup with France’s sovereign mint La Monnaie de Paris.
Since the protagonist of Maupassant’s novel rises in society by seducing influential women, Nouchi felt it was the right moment to introduce LGN’s womenswear, riffing off the idea of “equality in terms of looks,” Nouchi said. Changes were effected lightly, a change of buttoning side here, a pattern reworked around feminine curves there.
Asked to define his female archetype, he defined her as “central, fierce.”
If seeing Coco Rocha closing the show in a shirt and tie with a patent leather coat thrown over was anything to go by, she certainly looked the part.
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Launch Gallery: LGN Louis Gabriel Nouchi Men’s Fall 2024
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