All of America was sitting on the couch at home watching the Super Bowl, hoping for a Taylor Swift sighting, but you wouldn’t have known it at Ludovic de Saint Sernin’s scenic debut in New York City. Marc Jacobs, Jenna Lyons, Inez and Vinoodh were in the crowd that turned out to see what the Frenchman would do in the United States.
Tonight’s show was bigger than anything De Saint Sernin has done at home in Paris, where he has been appearing since 2017 (usually on the men’s calendar, but sometimes on the women’s calendar); he’s a model for a new kind of queer fashion that puts people of all genders in shiny tanks and briefs, lace-up hip jeans, and sexy, body-hugging clubwear.
What brought him to New York was a partnership with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. De Saint Sernin read Patti Smith’s National Book Award-winning memoir about her relationship with the pioneering photographer, Just kids, in his twenties, and credits the book not only with his self-discovery, but also with the creation of his brand. “I relate to him both personally and artistically, so this is kind of a highlight,” he said backstage.
It was important for De Saint Sernin to cover the breadth of Mapplethorpe’s range, from floral photography to his controversial chronicle of the gay BDSM scene. In doing so, he was able to create his own movement, opening with sheer organdy T-shirts paired with hand-cut velvet flowers and jeans, and moving into crystal versions of the flowers on a chainmail dress and a pair of skimpy one-shoulder halter-neck tops. “We’re starting the show with something very innocent, very pure and focused on Mapplethorpe’s work,” he said.
From there it continued with a reinterpretation of the New York office wear of the 1970s and 1980s, with leather trenches and bombers, and leather eyelet trousers, worn with a white button-down and bright red tie, similar to trousers worn by the photographer carried an iconic self-portrait. Less innocent, but tamer than what the designer ended up with. “Since this is a story about discovering identity, it gets darker and darker in the entire sex, night and club life,” said de Saint Sernin. “Mapplethorpe had the courage to share his imagination with the world and I think that is very powerful because he helped many people, including myself, to be truly daring and embody every part of ourselves.”
A leather apron dress with a cut-out front framed the model’s pecs, but more provocative were the leather trousers and briefs with ‘butt cleavage’, cut so deeply that they fell low in the back, revealing a few centimeters of crack, as shown with a push-up bra does for breasts. These final pieces brought back the feeling of De Saint Sernin’s earliest shows, when male self-expression (at least on the catwalks) was within narrower boundaries. It’s up to him and other rule breakers to expand our vision. For some, there was a Super Bowl to return to; Judging by the look of that cleavage, we missed a fun afterparty.
