Julien Fournié stages a sexy and vulnerable woman

(Paris) “I cried a lot while making this collection”: designer Julien Fournié staged a sexy and “ultravulnerable” woman in reaction to the pandemic, war and the rise of extremism, in his high fashion show sewing on Tuesday.

After presenting his collections in joyful films during the health crisis, the French couturier returned to the catwalks for the first time on Tuesday, with a show that he wanted to be “cathartic” in the face of “despair in relation to our time”.

“I’m celebrating this comeback with something very dark,” he says.

“I took a huge blow to myself after this period of COVID-19. […] I almost closed my house,” he admits.

jellyfish and manta ray

The theme of the collection is “light in the midst of nothingness. You can feel it in the embroideries, the textures. The goal is to find the light that exists in the dark”.

The parade takes place at the Bridge, a Parisian nightclub under the Alexandre III bridge, almost in a small committee.

“I don’t want dimension anymore people. It’s time to highlight my profession, ”he said in an interview with AFP in his workshops, during a distribution.

After two years of absence and virtual experiences, he does not hide his emotion to find the physical spectacle.

“If there is a girl who falls, she falls and everyone sees it. In a film, if it falls and if there is a problem on a dress, you recut and you refilm”, he says while making models put on vertiginous heels.

“I’m quite happy to be back on the podiums and, at the same time, it’s as if I had forgotten to ride my bike, as if I had lost all sewing habits”. “It puts you in danger, but it’s what makes you relearn your job,” says the couturier.

The music is dramatic, the girls, draped in figure-sculpting long dresses, are slightly eerie with their tousled hair and dark green lipstick.

Manta rays and jellyfish are evoked in the colors and elements of certain dresses, to arouse both fascination and awe.

“Right to be sexy”

An informed cinephile, he watched “hard” films like Alien, Thesilenceofthelambs Where Seven to design the outfits.

As in several collections this season, most of the looks are ultra-sexy, with games of transparency and lots of openings on the body.

“It’s a very sexy collection. Usually, I don’t do it, ”assumes Julien Fournié.

A reaction, for him, to a rise in religions, communitarianism: “We are a secular country and we are fed up with this slump in the human body. I think that in France, we still have this freedom to make sure to be sexy or naked! “, he gets carried away.

“It’s an anti-extreme collection,” he proclaims, judging that the sartorial modesty triggered by the #metoo movement was also part of the extremes.

“To show the body in our time is to be vulnerable. And being vulnerable is the most beautiful thing that can happen to us.”