The curious case of Andre Walker
An unexpected highlight of Paris Fashion Week was the Andre Walker presentation at Musee des Art Decoratifs. A former designer under Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton and at Jacobs’ own label, Walker recreated pieces he first designed in the mid-80s.
Back then, he didn’t have a production set-up, so after his shows he would take the original samples to Patricia Field and sell the one-offs. Which means that (until now), the pieces bought by Kim Jones, Paper magazine’s Kim Hastreiter and Pat Field herself were the only ones in existence.
While the pieces shown at PFW had something of an 80s sculptural quality to the silhouettes, they were fashioned out of fabric supplied by Pendleton, so think blanket-soft wool wrap coats with ovoid cut-out details and utilitarian stripes.
Even though the cuts were straight out of 1982, they looked surprisingly contemporary thanks to the understated styling with the socks and jazz shoes. (The whole thing was a rather low-key affair, hence the photobombers milling about in the background…)
I’m not sure where Andre Walker intends to go from here; he comes across as a bit of an outlier who has had a few false starts but never quite made it big. But he certainly created a buzz during a Fashion Month that seemed steeped in nostalgia. Perhaps he just needs a good business partner. One to watch in any case…
WORDS: Disneyrollergirl/Navaz Batliwalla
IMAGES: Vogue
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