The Tamesis
Mona Lisa, meet Marina Serre. As Paris Fashion Week kicks off, the designer beloved for his crescent-moon patterns and dexterity with upcycled materials is opting out of the show while revealing an exciting collaboration with the Louvre. From initial conversations with the museum about a year ago, she realized five outstanding creations, further testament to her imagination and resourcefulness.
A black dress is covered with nearly 500 tiny brush heads (unused makeup brushes), creating an eerie surface that resembles furry fish scales. Serre designed a figure-hugging minidress made from smashed paint tubes that required 240 hours of work, while another was strung from the back of a dial like a kind of chain mail. The “Flemish Painter Dress” combines a black scuba-style top with a short skirt made from a painter’s shirt, adding a modern twist to the historic silhouette. Look closely at her La Joconde dress, and you’ll see it’s a giant molded puzzle; each piece is moistened and embroidered with thread in the corresponding color, and 420 hours later, it becomes a wearable silhouette. Yes, these pieces fit perfectly with the Met Gala’s theme of “Fashion is Art.”
“I’m known for creating fashion out of valueless things, which is also typical of Marine Serre, and that’s why I like the connection between what I do and painting: it’s not the paint that costs a lot, but the time you spend painting,” she said. “Here we spend a lot of meditative time in the studio.”
As a result, Serre’s main collection was named “The Grace of Time,” which she arrived at after considering the timelessness of her clothes. Her lookbook is like a series of portraits, with each figure named, positioned and/or supported as if to riff on a classical look. The clothes within, however, were thoroughly contemporary, whether it was a tank top combined with a shirt to create a layered trompe l’oeil; a black top with a three-dimensional portrait collar or what she described as a “halo”; or a commercial version of a Flemish dress whose volume was created by the T-shirt at the waist.
There was plenty of catnip among the photos, supported by fruit and flowers, dogs and cats: a leather suit embossed with a moon and a faux fur “shawl” wrapped around the shoulders; a denim jacket with historic sleeves and bodice seams; denim trimmed with delicate tapestry (which would be different for each piece); Serre’s signature jersey cut into pom-pom cuffs, paired with a little black dress with sheer inlays (“La Bourgeoise”). Although a bit ugly, this portrait titled “La Providence” is striking. The draped mesh and inky blue bodycon dress in her signature monogram pattern follows the line of the lower bust like a corset without any restriction.
“It’s really important to make beautiful pieces that women recognize themselves in, but doing something new in ready-to-wear is much more complicated than in couture,” said Serre, who admitted that working on this collection was particularly time-consuming. The designer said she learned that Leonardo spent decades painting the Mona Lisa’s costume and adjusting the details to reflect the era. Five hundred years later, nine years after she founded her brand, Serre began to think about the long arc of her clothes, beyond the ingenuity of her materials. “I’m trying to make what I’m doing non-temporary. Like, imagine five years from now, it’s still going to work,” she said. “If you’re a good designer, this is what you should want.”
