Radical Chic

Fashion is undergoing a quiet revolution and Marine Serre is leading the charge. Divya Bala speaks to the designer redefining couture

- Divya Bala

CREATING. MULTIPLE. WORLDS.” The three words Marine Serre chooses to describe her design process are grandiose, perhaps, but not inaccurate. It’s the French designer’s ability to fuse disparate realms into new territory — at once futuristic and nostalgic, quotidian and couture, maximalist and refined — that has secured her position as one of the most captivating emerging talents in modern fashion.

“It really speaks of [this] generation,” Louis Vuitton artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière said of Serre’s aesthetic as he and the rest of the LVMH Prize jury (including Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri, the late Karl Lagerfeld and Phoebe Philo) awarded her the Young Fashion Designer Prize for 2017. The year’s youngest entrant, Serre had deeply moved them with her graduate collection, entitled Radical Call for Love and designed just months earlier in response to the political climate in Paris and Brussels post-2015/16 terrorist attacks, which took place during her final year at design school. Her hybrids of 19th-century dress and contemporary sportswear proposed a look that is both athletic and elegant, and her debut snagged ANDAM Fashion Award and Hyères Festival nominations, before she won the investment of fashion’s most discerning stockists, as well as the approval of the notoriously particular Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode in Paris.