The Masters graduation show of La Cambre Modes in Brussels isn’t like any other. For one thing, both first and second year students get to show their collections, and there are only 10 of them. That’s a radically small number, compared to the dozens who tend to populate the runways of most other fashion colleges. And for another: it’s the professionals who make up the audience. Particularly this year, on the 40th anniversary of the faculty, when the jury was convened from a dazzling roll-call of creative director alumni.
High stakes, and surely a daunting but incredible opportunity for students to show what they’re made of to Chanel’s Matthieu Blazy, Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello, Rabanne’s Julien Dossena, Dries Van Noten’s Julian Klausner, Olivier Theyskens, Nicolas Di Felice, Marine Serre, Lea Peckre, Louis Gabriel Nouchi, Cedric Charlier and Marie Adam-Leenaerdt. At a time of future employment anxiety for students everywhere, this small school’s outsize designer network puts La Cambre’s pupils in a potential position that has to be the envy of their peers globally.
La Cambre’s Tony Delcampe and his team of educators aren’t afraid of conceptualism. This year’s cohort went deep into the experimental techniques that obsess them—in fact, part of the teaching method here pushes them to look outside fashion to break with the mainstream and generate new ways of thinking. First impressions: several students were working on cutting and slicing materials into raw edged strips and re-making them into garments; several others were concerned with co-opting what looked like materials from architecture, furniture, and interior objects.
Gaspard Lasne (year 1) presented a collection of chair-men: His models appeared literally woven into the wooden frameworks of traditional cafe seating. Belgian surrealism lives! Marie Scerri (year 2) assembled multiple streamers of contrasting floral wallpaper prints, mixed with animal print; a layered collage draped to fly away as models walked.
One commonality was the challenging of the precepts of pattern-cutting. In earlier BA years, students are drilled in regular garment making; after that they delve into intense experimentation to come up with a collection. Lalou Weyrich (year 2) played with the construction of paper pop-up books, but you didn’t need to know that to be charmed by the air of youthful chic she had lightly pulled together in silhouettes that referenced tweed coats, scrolled bouncing plissé polka skirts, and micro-animal print blouses, topping it all off with earrings and trailing garlands of fabric flowers.
Bringing something fresh that speaks of femininity and classicism but avoids bland conventionality is a general need across fashion’s mainstream. Like Weyrich, Theodora Hadj Moussa Lauble has that potential. Last year, she made a poetic high-concept construct based on sail boats, incorporating strips of fabric fused to strips of balsa wood (which looks to have had quite an influence on her classmates). For her final show, her looks came closer to the body and traditional coat, jacket, and dress silhouettes, but were still rendered with delicate fabric-covered slats reminiscent of venetian blinds and home shelving.
If there’s a place for young designers who can bring technical innovation and a playfully clever jolt of joy to womenswear, then this could be where to find them. Where has the role of rebelliousness and the political gone in student fashion, though? Manon Schied won applause for a collection inspired by Zoe Leonard’s poem “I Want a Dyke for President. She researched lesbian clothing styles from the 1930s to 1970s, then embedded ribbed tanks and trompe l’oeil ties into layers of ticking shirts, cutting fabric into vertical strips (yes) and sewing them together with raw seams on the outside, and hybridizing suit trousers with boxers. Her models toted fabric megaphones, making her runway moment mimic a protest march.
Easily as technically nerdy with her skills as her peers, Schied was also determined to wear her politics on her sleeve, or rather emblazoned in unmissable 3-D text on the chests of shirts: “I want a dyke as president.” Afterward, Ester Manas ran up to congratulate her. Scheid has been interning in Manas’s studio in Brussels, and now she has a job with the designer, effective immediately. That’s the magic of La Cambre’s designer alumni network.