Haute couture spring-summer 2021: the Charles de Vilmorin brand, launched in the spring of 2020, marched with the elite<

At the age of 24, Charles de Vilmorin joined the Paris haute couture club this week with a 2021 spring-summer collection in bright colours, hand painted on exaggerated shapes.

"the guiding line of this collection is the notion of freedom, I did it instinctively, I wanted a rather crude result, straight to the point," says the designer, large and fine, in black turtleneck, who is compared to Yves Saint Laurent, which he "doesn't mind," he says.

He launched his brand in the spring of 2020 when his collection of colourful bombers was ready. The pieces have been promoted on its social networks and are made "to order to avoid overproduction". Less than a year later, it is included in the official calendar of La Haute Couture, an exclusively Parisian event that brings together a handful of houses that meet very strict criteria.

Sponsored by Jean Paul Gaultier

"I didn't necessarily match, in terms of seniority and all that, and it was Jean Paul Gaultier who decided to sponsor me," says the stylist. "it is a great proof that haute couture is in the process of evolving, going further and reviewing its characteristics. It can only be positive."

Jean Paul Gaultier hung up his scissors a year ago after 50 years of career and planned to present the revisited collections of his house with a stylist invited each season, a project that has not yet been realized.

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Enclosure

For this second fully virtual season, historic houses are being pushed to reinvent themselves with digital formats to replace parades. Charles de Vilmorin, who has never organized any, but who is very comfortable with Instagram, is in his element: "I can't really see what it's like under normal circumstances". He says he designed this collection thinking of the rendering on the images: "it's not the same to film a garment as to have a garment that scrolls less than a metre away from real people".

Butterflies, flowers that go up on the bodies: "I wanted this notion of hatching and new birth," says the stylist. For him, haute couture is used to experiment and rather than be portable, a garment must "express something". The health crisis has meant that fashion must be "sincere": "you no longer want to go through 36 billion ways to say something," he concludes.

Hand-painted fabrics

The son of a fashion designer and financial director, Charles de Vilmorin hand-painted most of the fabrics in the collection using acrylic and Chinese ink. The choice of "free and primary" colours and large brush strokes is assumed to create contrasts between the "craft" side of the materials and the high fashion techniques at the corset, ribs and finishes level.

It is Anaelle Postollec-her friend, muse and makeup artist who accompanies her projects-who poses in a dress with a marked waist, with exaggerated shoulders and a bust in the shape of balloons carried on cuissards with sharp heel, also with very vivid motifs. "I love everything that's dramatic, the big forms, it's almost theatre, something pretty weird, a dream that turned into a nightmare. It's paradoxical between all these colors and the forms that are violent," she confides.

Charles de Vilmorin "dares to throw herself into the void clearly, it resonates with the moment, it brings a message of something new and better that will come soon," says the young woman who makes makeup and body paintings with patterns that recall or complement those of outfits for video presentations.