TikTok is full of people staging fashion shows in their living rooms.
When Julie de Libran does it at Paris Couture Week, expect another level of chic. The designer stacked the show held in her Paris apartment with a multigenerational cast of friends and family made up of women who inspire her. “Each girl is like a flower,” she said.
As in the couture salons of yore, models climbed onto a round podium, holding a card printed with the number of their look. Three generations of one family got roped in. “I have a grandmother that had twins. One of the twins had twins, so I have all five of them in the show,” de Libran said.
Model and filmmaker Amalie Gassmann, dressed in a floor-length black and green brocade dress with glistening black sequin flowers, was followed by her mother Gay, an art and architecture consultant and writer, wearing a trapeze coat made from the same fabric.
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Mindy Lin Prugnaud, an executive at buying office Mint Group, watched proudly as her model daughter Amanda closed the show in a gold sequined skirt suit.
De Libran said she has always taken style cues from the women around her, starting with her mother, whose wardrobe she would raid as a teenager in California. “I was studying her clothes and that was France for me. Her closet was my childhood,” said the designer, who was born in Aix-en-Provence and moved to the U.S. in 1980.
She modeled look two, a linen jacket trimmed with crystals and embellished with iridescent flowers at the shoulders. It was paired with a long linen skirt with a mesh panel covered in coin-sized sequins that was hand-embroidered by Annalisa, an Italian seamstress who has worked with de Libran for 25 years.
The designer produces her creations in numbered and limited editions, often using deadstock fabrics. Standouts included a black silk slipdress with a bodice dripping long strands of silver fringe, and a pajama suit made of ecru brocade with a metallic sheen.
Even humbler-looking fabrics had a rich back story. A ‘50s-style white corset dress with a full skirt was made using a hemp textile produced with 91530 Le Marais, a farm and art residency near Paris whose Studio Sativa textile design arm develops custom fabrics for brands.
It all made for a charming presentation stacked with clothes that come pre-charged with their own history, and seem destined to gather layers of extra meaning as they make their journey from one wearer to the next.