Before Lanvin’s 2011 pre-fall show at the Bowery Hotel yesterday, Alber Elbaz explained his designs to the audience: “I see Internets every morning — I don’t have an e-mail address and, you know, I don’t do Internet, but every morning my boyfriend, Alex, makes me coffee and we watch these images. And more and more I see these stylish women wearing all these evening dresses for day, and I thought, how beautiful. So it’s not just about the nice gray sweater and the nice, I don’t know, that nice straight skirt, but it’s becoming a little bit more elaborated during the day.”
Backstage after the presentation, Elbaz told The Cut more about his process. “The pre-collection doesn’t really start from an inspiration, it doesn’t start from a trip to India. It starts more with needs and desire and dressing women; wardrobe,” he said. “And more and more I see women saying to me that they don’t go out at night much, but that they love all these flamboyant dresses to be worn during the day. And I’m saying it’s almost like those amazing dishes that we only serve when we have guests. So use it every day; use it in the morning, use it when you feel like, use it when you’re by yourself. So this is the story.”
Elbaz said that using animals in Lanvin’s shots of the collection — photos including dogs, rabbits, and big cats — was “just intuition.” “We are trying to look for something to shoot, we’re looking for a format, so we didn’t want to do just, like, a white background and a girl that is kind of robotic,” he explained. “And I was always looking to do something within the little space we have at Lanvin to kind of make sure that we are telling a story. So this time it was these animals, and I thought it would be nice and fun and funny, and why not?”
