A last-minute visa issue may have kept Isa Boulder cofounder and designer Cecilia Basari from backstage interviews at the end of the brand’s off-schedule debut show in Paris at 3537 on Monday, but her first ready-to-wear designs did most of the talking for her.
The message they carried: traditional handcrafts like macramé are as cool and experimental as can be.
“Most of us know how to weave and do macramé [in Indonesia] because there is a tradition of doing ‘bantan,’ a preparation for daily prayer where you use dried leaves to make offerings,” she told WWD from Bali, where the three-year-old label is based. “But I wanted to reintroduce these techniques in a younger and more playful way.”
And she did. Out came a flowy gray dress with latticed sleeves and bodice; boy shorts with a daring cutout at the hips; an intricate fine-gauge gray halterneck bodysuit and matching hipster pants; a cargo trouser with net pockets, and a pair of shorts in an ottoman weave that ended up looking denim-like, one of the handful of men’s looks in the lineup.
Sensual and revealing were the looks but you could also imagine recasting their components as underlayers or overlays to jazz up a quieter outfit.
Coming up next for the brand is developing its vocabulary beyond its figure-hugging styles and “experimenting further on how knitwear could achieve more,” said Basari.
A dress with sleeves that spiraled around the arms, its net bodice growing into a flowing skirt; a red gown that contoured the body with pockets hiding in sculptural folds, and the striking white macramé dress closed the show offered a tantalizing glimpse of that direction.