Collection FW2015: Bouquets Sellier

A curious quartet!  Straps, curb chains, harnesses and stirrups are gathered into bright bouquets, like cut flowers.  Tassles hang like clustered bluebells, leather straps are tied into bows, spurs resemble starry daisies, bits are looped like flower garlands, and riding crops become calyxes.  Horses' heads, their manes rippling and ringletted, burst from the sheaves like wild blooms.  Arranged on horse blankets, folded to show their front and reverse sides, the four compositions are a perfect metamorphosis of fabrics, leather and metal parts.

Collection FW2015: Cheval Fusion

Metal in fusion. Mercury, perhaps? The substance is sleek, glossy, somehow alive… and supremely seductive.  Impossible not to think of another carré – Vif argent, created a few seasons ago by the same designer, Dimitri Rybaltchenko – at the sight of this design.  Mercury is unique: a metal in a naturally liquid state, sensitive to the slightest pressure, so that it scatters in a multitude of fluid, free-flowing baubles.

Cheval fusion: the protean liquid suggests an array of potential forms.  Bits, buckles and stirrups coalesce, and a proud steed is born.  The magic of metamorphosis!  Could this be the lair of Hephaestus, the Greek god of the forge and volcanoes, inventor of magical objects?  Could this outburst of metal hold a clue to the secret art of alchemy?  Remember – Mercury is also a planet, named for a Roman god, whose Greek ancestor bore the name… Hermes.

Collection FW2015: Le Potager Extraordinaire

Like the island of Lilliput, discovered by Lemuel Gulliver in the course of his extraordinary Travels, as related by Jonathan Swift, the inhabitants of Pierre-Marie’s imagined city are ‘lilliputian’ (tiny) indeed. 

The design presents the delightful spectacle of their daily lives. In this childlike world of transformations and metmorphoses, a vegetable garden becomes a complex city inhabited by creatures identical to ourselves in every way, but who are no more than an inch or two in height. Flowing with water thanks to an ingenious irrigation system doubling as a water-slide, the city’s dwelling-places are clearly named: cucumis melo (a melon), foeniculum (a fennel bulb) or cucurbita maxima (a pumpkin)... Take time to look around – there are surprises and delights at every turn. Lovers meet in the shade of a grove of leeks, a man sits meditating at the heart of a lotus-shaped artichoke, a marrow is cut to form a car, and a minuscule duo set to work slicing a radish with a two-handled saw…

Collection FW2015: Les Ailes de la Soie

 The butterfly is without doubt the most enduring symbol of metamorphosis.  Earthbound in caterpillar form, it next becomes a nymph or larva, and an imago, before fluttering into the air with incomparable delicacy.  The cocoon it leaves behind is spun from threads of which precious material? Silk, of course.

Aline Honoré’s design borrows the silhouette and pattern of four superb lepidopterae – the Attacus Caesar of the southern Philippines, the Argema Mittrei or Comet Moth of Madagascar, the Epiphora Bauhiniae or silkmoth of Saharan Africa, and the "Jacobece d’Amérique".  Their delicate, dazzlingly-coloured wings are decked with a multitude of geometric motifs, defining their stylised silhouettes against a background of silken cocoons.