Well, here we are then. We’re back, I guess. Runway shows! (Thank you for the major, major New York Public Library moment, Mr. Jacobs.) Street style! (What can tell you? I am still shuffling about in an ancient pair of Gap jeans.) More IG posts about fashion happenings and parties than you can point an iPhone 12 Pro Max at! (No pangs of envy about those, yet, or more likely, ever, but check in with me again after Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga IRL haute couture debut.) But still: For all of the Business as Usual signs being put back in place, does that messaging really live up to the reality? Plus: For all of us who’ve worked through this past year-plus, we’ve had a lot of time to really think about why we’re in the industry they call fashion.
Funnily enough, that was the question put to Antonin Tron, the thoughtful, contemplative and, oh yes, very talented designer behind the French label Atlein. He knows exactly why he’s in it. “I have no choice, I can’t do anything else,” Tron replied, with a rueful laugh. “This is what I do. I love making clothes. I love cutting. I love making shapes.” We were on a Zoom—where else?—to chat about Tron’s resort, 26 sublime looks which nurse no greater ambition than to be absolutely terrific things to wear, created with precision, care, and emotion; a celebration of craft and technique imbued with a pragmatic approach to get dressed every day.
You could romanticize Tron’s story of quiet and refined clothes-making to the ends of the earth: He grapples with constructing his work with as few seams and as much thought as possible. And maybe we should; maybe when we talk about storytelling in fashion, responsible design is the one tale that needs to be getting told a little more often and a little more loudly these days.
Much of what you see here was made out of supplies of fabrics that Tron already had to hand, and then used to refine pieces and silhouettes he’d previously explored. Look one, for instance, a slip dress with an artful knot, made out of a shimmery gold satin (first used in his spring 2020 collection), worn over a black tank made out of eco Seaqual yarn, and terrific black pants of the sort not seen since the days of the much missed Helmut Lang. (Those pants are a recurring favorite here, adding to the streamlined layering look Tron’s got going on).
Also for your consideration: The cocooning drape dress, which looked like the love child of Mme Grès and Mme Vionnet, with falls of fabric which can slide off to reveal the shoulders, long in blue, short in red. Or a terrific camel skirt, with a bias panel which bisects it to give a graphic look—and a distinctly sensual attitude. A black vegan leather (from fall 2019) shirt to throw over everything; a surf rash guard (Tron is a serious surfer) to layer under everything. Black sequins cut, sliced, and reversed for dresses and skirts and sparkling with a sporty, casual ease which diffuses the glamour. And the standout (for this reviewer, at least): Tron’s coppery satin tank dress, bound at the edges with scuba-like seaming, as low-key as it is luminescent. In other words: Perfection, in the most real and relevant of ways. And in other words: a reminder of exactly why one might get into (and stay) in fashion.
