Pynck started 2020 in Paris with the fashion equivalent of a good wine. A week ago, the winter edition of the Tranoï Bourse trade show took place alongside Men’s Fashion Week. Braving the French strikes and the winter blues, the Tranoï teams put together a vast and vibrant professional gathering. They selected, curated and displayed about 80 sizzling hot fashion labels for the pleasure of crowds of buyers, journalists and bloggers from around the world. Strategically located in the prestigious Paris Bourse, the historical Paris stock exchange also known as the Palais Brongniart in the 2nd arrondissement, Tranoï has once again this year given a very great deal of attention to the interior design and decoration of their exhibition space. The buyer to buyer platform knows that it is not only necessary to show serious, beautiful and ambitious brands, but also to highlight their uniqueness in an architectural treasure chest facilitating the visualization of clothes.
Negri creates his designs by expressing his feelings through icons and symbols. He ensures all his creations are of the highest quality, made in Italy and using only natural materials. As you can see on the picture above, t
he main feature of his creations are prints, artworks and mosaics produced with patchworks. By re-using and blending prints and real reproductions of artworks on a textile medium, Negri creates a modern historic dress of his own, covered with new meanings and novel associations.Above, a superb deep green flowing and belted dress. If you don’t dare wearing bright colours and bold prints, but still want to make a statement wearing a unique piec, this is the perfect dress for you. The long-sleeved button cuff is another elegant detail that is not unseen.
If on the other hand you love to freely express your style and are not afraid of a high-dose of colour, the dresses and vest shown in the above picture are just what you might have been looking for all along ! I particularly admire the choice of artworks and miscellaneous prints which are intertwined so as to create a saturated yet harmonious result.
DARIN HACHEM
Pynck’s second highlight for Tranoï is also a Milan-based fashion label. Despite a very different cultural and academic background, Darin Hachem and Fernanda Gallardo have come together in the last few years to pursue a common goal: to reduce the divide between East and West in the name of, and through sustainable fashion. Since the brand’s foundation, DARIN HACHEM has launched half a dozen organic and earthy collections with her Mexican partner.
DARIN HACHEM, the two women told me, promotes human rights, universal values of equality, warmth and happiness. The label should speak to women who celebrate the act of wearing timeless, comfortable and high-spirited pieces. The duo explained to me that their creative process is framed by their desire for clients and themselves to buy less but better, and more intelligently, to bring to light the precious craftsmanship necessary to achieve a meaningful collection. It should also be noted that Darin and Fernanda source and make all their creations in Italy in respect of Human and Labor rights.
DARIN HACHEM’s collections always revolve around one artist whose works were especially impactful on the two designers. Lately, both designers have studied and collected material on Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair, active in the mid 1950’s. Her sculptural abstract phase combining western abstraction with Islamic Aesthetics embodied the visual syncretism DARIN HACHEM was looking to compose.
In the picture above, you can see Saloua Choucair’s influence on the clothes : geometric shapes paired with more organic ones, earthy and sunny hues, an intriguing interlocking of details within details within other details creating stimulating visual and textural correspondance between the multiplicity and the unity.
Here, the jackets and jumpers pursue the same objective of naturel. Angular details like the big collars and cuffs contrast nicely with open collars and loose fabrics. Either shiny or opaque, the materials are all incredibly soft and resistant. They are all naturally tinted by a natural dye artist in Italy with “Quebracho”, a colored mixture obtained from a combination of plants. 
The impressive coat and trousers shown in the picture above were probably my favourite pieces from DARIN HACHEM’s booth. The quirkiness of the cuts, the wood and clay colour palette and the interactivity between the details profoundly connect the brand’s identity to Earth. DARIN HACHEM proves that poetry and sophistication can coexist !
SCYLT
Kenryu Watanabe is the brain behind SCYLT, a label which he founded in 2016. I noticed SCYLT immediately amongst the other less striking booths. This was partly due to the absence of colour emanating from the brand’s space, but also more interestingly from the fact that the designer himself was creating a piece right in front of everyone in the booth. I was fascinated and walked over. As Kenryu Watanabe introduced himself, I saw that I had just interrupted a careful embroidering session. Watanabe went on to explain his brand’s genesis and concept.
SCYLT is fundamentally a laboratory for creating modern and minimally designed white shirts. How, I am sure you are wondering, can white shirts be considered a pivotal garment in a look if its main accepted function is to formalise and neutralise any stylistic oddities ? Well, SCYLT spearheads a new genre of white shirts : those that stand out, those that have a true exclusive identity, those that are not neutral like all the others.
Kenryu Watanabe embroidering a white shirt.
Watanabe’s embroideries look like ink drips poured slowly or at high speed from a small jug. They oppose themselves quite nicely with the black seams on the sleeves, cuffs and collar, thus creating a structure for the shirt. The ink dripping trompe l’oeil is a reference and hommage to painter Jackson Pollock whose technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of action painting and a definite landmark in modern art. With this technique, Pollock argued that he was able to achieve a more immediate means of creating, giving the impression of youthfulness, as if the work had just been created a few minutes before. Watanabe’s originality is that he doesn’t throw ink over the shirts like Pollock did over the canvas. Instead, Watanabe imitates the spontaneous throwing with detailed embroidery, makes thread look like liquid. The result is artistic, fine and beautifully abstract.
By defying the convention of prints being tidy and figurative, SCYLT opened the door to many other innovative ideas. See for instance the tweed shirts and jackets above : black and white variations, multiple variations on classical collars, the abnormally wide checked motifs, the drips… If Chanel and Pollock had a child, it would probably be wearing SCYLT clothing.
