ON MESSAGE

Young designer MARINE SERRE has given the fashion industry a dynamic push with her hybrid garments, radical messaging and distinct vision. Recently in Hong Kong to launch her capsule collection, she tells Zaneta Cheng why fashion is never just about garments but a catalyst for change

Can fashion ever be more than just shallow, superficial ornamentation? It’s a question that the celebrated young designer Marine Serre answered “no” to for much of her childhood, but something changed when she turned 16.

What did she come to realise? “It’s the first way you express yourself,” Serre says. “Even without talking, you can express yourself with fashion and I think that’s been quite important for me. I took some time to understand that fashion is not only about superficial image or making a skirt that’s just a skirt. I knew these things could mean more. But the question was how to make it work.”

Serre’s eventual answer took the fashion industry by storm almost two years ago, when the La Cambre graduate presented her first runway show, Manic Soul Machine, for Autumn/Winter 2018. She’d just won €300,000 (S$452,800) from the 2017 LVMH Prize for young fashion designers and hired a new team with whom she coined the term “future wear”.

“My team and I would talk constantly about knitwear, footwear and outerwear, and I’d explain the way I worked, ‘hybriding’ sportswear and flou garments, and they’d tell me that the piece was neither dress nor pant, and was difficult to put in a box,” Serre explains. “Then we decided, for fun, to call it future wear, because it was simply a garment made for the future. With time, this joke became something concrete. And now, future wear makes sense with the green line that we make entirely from upcycled material. So it just became something that means a lot to us.”

Serre consistently emphasises that she can’t make garments for the sake of it. Every piece she makes has meaning. “When we talk about what the garment of the future is, we’re not just talking about the garment, we’re talking about what our life is going to be.”