At Her Paris Debut, Belgian Newcomer Marie Adam-Leenaerdt Surprised With Her Strange Chic Designs

While a new exhibition in Paris celebrates 1997 as a “Big Bang” year in fashion, ideas sparked in the early ’90s were at play on the runway this season in the form of deconstruction. The technique, associated with Martin Margiela and the Antwerp Six, was taken up by Thom Browne and Junya Watanabe, revisited by Dries Van Noten, and pushed in new directions by 23-year-old Brussels-based newcomer Marie Adam-Leenaerdt.

The designer made her Paris debut in what she called a “soulless” conference room. This arguably male domain was a foil for her sophisticated women’s designs, which might have read as bougie if there weren’t something so “off” about them, like jackets with small shoulders that slanted toward the chest, strange geometric silhouettes, and the collection’s hero pieces—coats with standing lapels.

Although there is a reversible skirt and a pair of boots that can be adapted with zippers, the deconstruction engaged in here was mostly playful and conceptual. There’s been a lot of discussion about the female gaze as it applies to “sexy” dressing; Adam-Leenaerdt seemed to be turning hers to ideas around femininity and propriety. This is a very covered-up collection that reconstructs a woman’s curves into geometries of enveloping drapes, with proportions either blown-up or shrunken. A dress that seems to have a box inside of it is tied with a couture bow, other dresses seem to have three arms. If there’s a touch of Balenciaga to her work, that might be because Adam-Leenaerdt worked there for a while.

But while Cristóbal Balenciaga was concerned with pure form, and Demna, in the past, liked to position his designs within grand narratives relating to climate, politics, and his own autobiography, there’s a deliberate domestic aspect to Adam-Leenaerdt’s work. Women have often been relegated to the home, but she wants to transform and celebrate ordinary aspects of life—“to reveal the beauty in the ‘has-been’ elements of the daily world, to divert them, to have fun with them.” To that end Adam-Leenaerdt reimagined a folded table napkin as a white dress, and she fashioned dresses out of tablecloths.

Her aim, it seems, is to make us engage with what is immediately around us, by taking something known, a code or a silhouette, and giving it a subtle strangeness that makes you stop and adjust your vision.