SPHERE Paris Fashion Week® Showroom

It's a not-to-be-missed event, a Parisian ritual, the Right Bank haven where design is on show. Since January 2020, the FHCM has been holding the Sphere Paris Fashion Week® Showroom, with the support of DEFI and L'Oréal Paris. Sphere is part of its mandate to support emerging creation and brings together a range of award-winning brands invited to the Official Calendar, selected for their creativity and development potential.

“This is the sixth and final season,”declares Pierre-François Valette. “This experience has enabled us to fine-tune our presentations in a very beautiful space in the heart of Paris, to get press exposure, distribution, and the chance to have a whole organisation planned for us.  Soon we'll have to fly the nest,” says the designer and artistic director of Valette Studio. The Winter 2024 collection expresses all the facets of this maturity in a gender-neutral way: “I wanted to pay homage to the golden age of haute couture, so we worked in silhouettes with stripes, tartans, oversized houndstooth with a V of three colours. There's a lot of research into materials. And we're asserting more of an identity. The fabrics and their finishes (silk, virgin wool, organza, technical jersey) also evoke an evening of sophistication and the house's attachment to ‘manual’ craftsmanship, which has never been more relevant.”

And so it is with these new storytellers who are committed to defending a history, as much as the spirit of their times, whose contours they are redrawing, like Steven Passaro, who is rethinking the men's wardrobe by combining traditional tailoring and 3D virtual prototyping technology. “This season, I tackled the theme of change. I feel an emergency in the air. We feel a greater sense of meaning and connection with the environment. We miss the past, but we want to move forward.” It's a tandem. 

Menswear remains the place for all kinds of experimentation, for all kinds of stylistic exercises combining the tailor's hand with deconstruction. What do Parisian Jeanne Friot and her "Coming out" collection have in common with Lagos Space Programme, a design concept based in Lagos around artistic collaborations? Between Ouest Paris, which revisits the archetypes of urban dressing, and Rolf Ekroth, who draws his inspiration from Nordic sportswear? The answer is undoubtedly the awareness that fashion has to be approached responsibly, integrating streetwear and the tailoring heritage into a multidisciplinary vision. This is how Rolf Ekroth interprets his personal memories of winter sports against a backdrop of polar darkness in 1980s Finland. “The collection's meticulously knitted ski jump suits, leather shorts similar to those worn by ice hockey goalkeepers, bags that mimic racing bibs and reinvented childhood sofas all tell a story of athleticism observed in the comfort of home.” As with Jeanne Friot, personal experience becomes a theme of inspiration, relayed here by evocations. Utility meets autofiction. Between worksite overalls and cross-country ski outfits, the garment reintroduces its protective dimension, like a cocoon to confront not only the cold, but also a world under high tension.