It didn’t matter that Louis Gabriel Nouchi held his 8 p.m. show in a long, rickety stairwell in a space as raw as a construction site — it probably made it even better for the overflowing LGN crowd streaming out, desperate to get in to come. of that scene – the fandom, the grittiness and something about the dark minimalism and assertive march of the models – felt almost nostalgic, a bit like the underground show haunts of the Belgians and Helmut Lang in Paris in the 1990s.
Maybe there’s a connection there. Nouchi is a graduate of Belgium’s educational powerhouse, La Cambre School in Brussels. Fellow alumni include Olivier Theyskens, Anthony Vaccarello, Matthieu Blazy, Julien Dossena and Nicolas di Felice, an illustrious force in fashion. Nouchi also learned the trade from Raf Simons. What’s certain: his proven ability to craft sharp tailoring and sharp thong bodies has clearly attracted an enthusiastic contingent of young Parisians and the menswear fraternity around him.
Nouchi always starts with a novel as a starting point to explore masculinity: American psychopath And A single man over the past few seasons. This time he had chosen Maupassant’s Call Ami, a 19th-century story, he explained, depicting “an arriviste” who ruthlessly uses women to gain power. “So it gave us the idea to do women’s clothing for the first time,” he said. “And because we already had many women as customers, we wanted to do that for a long time. But,” he added, his own plot has been rewritten from a feminist-supportive point of view. “Because the LJN girl is just as fierce as we are.”
