DATE: 24th June 2025. PLACE: IFM Campus. TIME: 18.00
Institut Francais De La Mode revealed a parade of sartorial trailblazers, providing signature pieces, unique forms, and tantalizing cuts. With experimentation being the connecting thread between all the collections, this year’s graduates presented craft-heavy pieces, with strong intellectual backdrops. Inspired by a vast array of references, it seems that the students were pushed to take risks and embrace their failures as the most crucial part of their process. Vicente Aycaguer Muñoz Casa Susanna, a photobook and documentary about a house where men – who led typically heteronormative lives – would gather to dress and live as women. Clementine Smith tailoring was delicate, emblazoned by a seamless versatility in structure. Zelig Davoult collection draws from the post-Soviet visual and emotional landscape of the 1990s and 2000s, reimagined with irony and affection. Symbols of everyday life.
Eastern Promises draws from the post-Soviet visual and emotional landscape of the 1990s and 2000s, reimagined with irony and affection. Symbols of everyday life – wall carpets, mosaics, knockoff sportswear – are juxtaposed with the ornate detail of Ukrainian folk craftsmanship. The collection is both a reflection and a reinterpretation: a commentary on cultural identity, memory, and transformation.
My collection draws from Casa Susanna, a photobook and documentary about a house where men – who led typically heteronormative lives – would gather to dress and live as women. What struck me was how the rigid concepts of gender dissolved in that space. I wanted to explore the in-between: imagining the first moment someone tries on women’s clothing, embracing the so-called “mistakes” that come with discovery and self-expression.
This collection is a tribute to Abidjan, the vibrant capital of Côte d’Ivoire. It celebrates the street as a runway, sport as a universal language, and the Ivorian people as a generative creative force. Each look embodies a character – a fragmented identity shaped by a city where fashion, sport, and digital imagery blur into one.
The tension between authenticity and artifice, the human and the mask, runs throughout. BABI is my way of translating Abidjan’s plurality – its many faces, its kinetic energy – which has always pulsed through my creative practice.
This collection lives in the liminal static between Superliminal’s warped dimensions and Minecraft’s looping logic – a sartorial rebellion against the scripts we are coded to repeat. Here, six looks delve into the quiet chaos between truth and fiction. It invites the viewer into a space where the familiar becomes uncanny, and the uncanny becomes a mirror.
Like Magritte’s pipe that is not a pipe, these clothes whisper contradictions: this is real, this is not.
Les Voleuses imagines a group of elegant, thrill-seeking women – bored with their privileged lives – who turn to art theft not for need, but for pleasure. It’s a fantasy of subversion wrapped in wealth, led by an eternal muse: Catherine Deneuve. Her image, equal parts aloof and iconic, helped shape the collection’s refined but mischievous tone.
I wanted to reinterpret the wardrobe of the ultra-wealthy woman with a twist: one eye on elegance, the other on cunning utility.
