Photography by Vassilis Karidis
Lanvin shows are a joy. Everything this venerable French house – pardon, maison – puts its stamp on, from the set to the music to the catering (not to mention the clothes), seems conceived to convey a sense of happiness, frivolity and legeresse, with an unmistakably French quirkiness. A few seasons ago, it served framboise and cassis macaroons – oh, those hyper-calorific, Technicolorful, Marie Antoinette, cream-filled meringues from paradise that generate the eternal stampede of super-sized tourists outside the Ladurée shops on rues Royale and Bonaparte – that were exactly the same shade of pink and purple as the clothes unleashed on the catwalk a few minutes later. Another season, the theme was the circus: sweets and drinks were served from a striped tent. Yet another season, it was cheesy disco and mirror balls – at 10am! PartiaI as I am to macaroons (indeed, to the French pâtisserie in its entirety), I confess that what gives me the greatest joy at each and every Lanvin show is the finale. Men’s shows are the best. Here you have creative director Alber Elbaz alongside designer Lucas Ossendrijver, together on the catwalk, taking the bow. You should see: they are Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Where Elbaz is round, short and clad in a Chaplinesque, all-black ensemble of floppy jacket and rolled-up trousers, Ossendrijver is tall and lanky, all jeans, unpressed shirts and skinny jackets. Both shy and a tad goofy, they’re as far from the designer-as-Hollywood-star à la Tom Ford as can possibly be: a breath of fresh air. “Me and Alber, we are totally complementary,” says the softly-spoken Ossendrijver. “We are both similar and different. Work-wise, we function together perfectly: we talk a lot at each and every step of the collection’s development, but we need not be together all of the time. In fact, we don’t even share a workspace. We can see each other from the window – Alber’s studio is right across the street from mine”.
We are at the Lanvin headquarters on rue Boissy D’Anglais, in Paris’ Haussmannier-thanthou 8th arrondissement. Ossendrijver’s slender features – elongated face and limbs, and not too much flesh on the bone – suggest he is a man of sober habits; someone accustomed to living with less rather than more. Our meeting confirms that he is. “For me, it’s very important to get rid of one’s own attachment to things,” he says, on the verge of a political statement. “This applies to design as it does to life. It’s too easy to go too far; on the contrary, taking a step back and deciding when to stop can be rather daring! That’s what really fascinates me.” The set of our encounter – a wooden-floored, whitewashed room furnished only with two spartan chairs and a coffee table – reflects the designer’s agenda of less-asmore. Heavy curtains of black velvet enclose the space on one side; airy windows let the natural light seep in from the other. It is strangely reminiscent of a monk’s cell, albeit a cell in which one can gorge on macaroons to one’s heart’s content.
Ossendrijver is dressed monastically in a navyblue jumper, light-blue Oxford shirt, dark-blue jeans and trainers – “All Lanvin,” he says with a smile, promptly adding, “Which is rather rare.” He is unassuming: there is little evidence of fashion egotism here. He has clearly not let the designer take over the man. His extreme reservation on personal matters only adds to the charm.
It is a charm that is part of the very history of the house. Founded by Jeanne Lanvin in 1885, it is one of the oldest standing couture houses in Paris, as well as one of the very few that do not belong to a luxury conglomerate. As sartorially skilled as she was business-minded, Madame Lanvin founded an empire that spanned clothing, furniture and perfumes, and she was the first couturier – in 1924! – to introduce a men’s line. But by 2001, when Alber Elbaz arrived from Yves Saint Laurent, the esteemed house was out of steam, despite a stellar era of Claude Montana-designed couture in the early 1990s. With a unique mix of chic and shabby, goof and glitz, the wickedly gifted Elbaz quickly established Lanvin as the pinnacle of female desirability and glamour. When, four years later, he decided to do the same for menswear, Elbaz picked Ossendrijver from Hedi Slimane’s team at Dior Homme.
It was a visionary appointment. Five years later, Ossendrijver’s delicate take on masculinity – his vision is more about fragility and sensuality than muscular assertiveness – is increasingly seen as revolutionary. “My role as a designer is to help people see other possibilities,” he explains. “Fashion can be a means of escape to be somebody else or, simply, a way to dream. At Lanvin we try to be as open – as non-exclusive – as possible. For me, Lanvin is first and foremost a state of mind. I want our men’s stores to be seen as a luxury supermarket, with a bit of everything for everyone, no matter their body type.”
Openness, acceptance, inclusivity? That’s not what fashion talk’s usually about. Behind the industry’s endlessly promoted ideals of uniqueness and exclusivity, there is the shadow of relentless homogenisation, culminating in strict body fascism. Not so, thank goodness, at Lanvin. It is all the more refreshing to hear from a designer who trained under the king of hysterical thinness. “Working with Hedi was great for me,” Ossendrijver recalls fondly. “From him I learned how to reach the extreme, and how to be extremely precise.” Far from Dior’s obsessive precision, Ossendrijver’s own recipe balances controlled casualness and apparent mistakes with a rigorous foundation. “That, for me, is what French elegance is all about: mistakes!” he says. “When I started this project at Lanvin, I had this idea to create a small wardrobe. It all evolved naturally from there. Whatever we do, we do it to answer a need. Not some sort of market strategy. And this is probably what makes us so successful with such a biased demographic of men out there.”
Despite having dramatically reinvented contemporary masculinity from head to toe, Ossendrijver is, by his own admission, simply a very good technical designer. He is less interested in grand ideas and theories than in putting his fabric where his form is, and finding practical solutions to everyday problems. It makes sense, coming from a man at first torn between fashion and architecture. “I grew up in the Dutch countryside. For me, fashion was always some kind of dream. Only later, at design school, did I discover that I could make a living out of it.
“I relish the immediacy of fashion,” he continues. “The fact that you are constantly challenged to produce something new, and that the results are pretty fast. Fashion forces you constantly to question everything. Architecture, on the other hand, is very, very slow. That said, I am all for evolution, not revolution. I do not like newness and change for the sake of it: I like things to evolve gradually, organically, from one step to the next. I love working with the tailors, testing new techniques in the factories, choosing fabrics and developing fits. Above all, I love working with a close team: that’s by far the best part of my job.” His main workspace, though crammed with samples and assistants, is not in the least chaotic. “My team is tight and I have people from all ends of the earth. There are very few of us, but we are all very close. I want everybody to learn while we work. Which is why I make sure that even the interns stay with us for the whole cycle, from drawing the collection on paper to throwing it on the catwalk.”
When Ossendrijver speaks, he conveys a fascinating contradiction of warmth and detachment. He has managed to maintain a kind of outsiders’ perspective on fashion, which is one reason his work is so special. Still, he is technical but not unemotional. “There is a lot of myself in what I do,” he concludes. “After all these years, I still feel a bit like a stranger here in Paris, but that is good. It gives me an angle. For me, the most important thing is to inject soul into everything I do.”
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Originally published in Dapper Dan, Issue 01, March 2010. Styling by Nicholas Georgiou.