PARIS — Paris Fashion Week had barely begun before the wind was knocked out of it.
The culprit was Marine Serre: a surprisingly elfin radical, 5 feet and change tall, soft-spoken in the extreme. At a rehearsal space, on loan from the choreographer Blanca Li, in the 19th Arrondissement, Ms. Serre, 26, staged her first formal show, an assured, spiny debut from a designer who previously had only a few moon-printed jerseys and some historically minded moiré skirts to her name. “At the beginning,” Ms. Serre protested, at the mention of that. Yes, I agreed: six months ago.
Ms. Serre has come far, fast, and the guests at the show Tuesday morning took notice. Three collections in, she already has the benediction of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton; she won the 2017 LVMH Prize for young fashion designers, an award worth 300,000 euros, or about $369,000, which is decided by a jury including the designers Nicolas Ghesquière, Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs.
Her new collection had less of the overt historical references she once leaned on; it was easier to believe, as her notes put it, that she “always keeps the future in sight.” There were still yards of her signature crescent moon prints, but joining them were pieces with a kind of tough glamour: denim jackets cinched and molded after the model of corsets; utility jackets with bottle holders, lipstick caddies and phone pockets to “replace the classic handbag” — an admirably heresy in an industry carried on the back of accessory sales.
Ms. Serre has worked in the studios of Balenciaga, Dior and Margiela, and her work has reflections of that experience, particularly in her willingness to push what fashion people euphemize as a “strong” look. But she doesn’t sound like a cog of the industry; she sounds more like a revolutionary.
“The day of the romantic designer, standing safely in a zone outside of business and production is over,” she wrote in her show notes, by way of explaining her commitment to “upcycling” and working more sustainably — as in the pièce de résistance, show-closing dresses made of vintage scarves or shirts found, washed and then combined. She is not the only designer to make use of vintage textiles, but in her hands, and in her hybrid sportswear-and-scarf dresses, they looked cool.
She spoke, as many designers speak nowadays, about the need for protection: the tough jackets, the head wraps, the giant reflective sunglasses that shielded many of the models. “You want to hide a little bit,” she said. “That’s the world today.”
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