After Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Cacharel, Paris, London and New York, the young French designer, Anaïs Guery, returns to Paris to create her own firm in 2014: Traditional couture for the 21st century.
Origins: “My first approach to fashion was through art history and old textiles. In my family, sewing was a tradition and I felt very attracted to the idea of mastering both the technical and the creative parts. When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time browsing books in public libraries in order to gather ideas about details, shapes, fabrics, colors. I remember the pleasure of the inspiration process. When I was studying, I used to experiment quite a bit, manipulating fabric and the pattern designs, which has always been my passion. I didn’t ‘decide’ to become a designer, it was rather something that just happened, naturally.”
Lessons: “When I worked at Dior, Balenciaga and Cacharel, I discovered what one could call an obsession for innovation and inspiration, a continuous search for something that is linked with your most deep-rooted feeling of beauty. While it is something very personal, you learn to do it surrounded by a lot of people in this humming atmosphere that is so typical of important fashion firm studios. I also learned about the handling of fabric and the importance of the most minuscule details, such as the weight of two silks that you’d swear were the same, but that were actually not”.
Identity: “For me it was important to launch my brand on the same stage as the houses that have trained me. I felt so French in New York and London, that it made me reflect on that sentiment. Style, and I would say even femininity, are so unique in France. They’re quite natural, and yet sophisticated at the same time. They are qualities that I value so much now, and which I missed in New York and London”.
Inspiration: “Most of the time, I am inspired by everything except fashion. The touch of a wall, the translucency of a curtain at a certain hour of the evening… They’re impressions and feelings. As far as cuts and outlines are concerned, I always follow a red line, which is to create collections as if they were the continuation of what I started years and years ago in my head, making slight changes from one collection to another. The constant blend of the shapes is what has fascinated me since the beginning of my career and my current taste with regard to textiles and textures”.
Originality: “How you decide to interweave the part of the recognizable codes with the completely original ones that you’re using is something essential for a designer. For me this is a very exciting part of my work: a large number of shapes already exist and they mean something to people. Codes that move each person, codes that lead them to common ground. It is then when the fabrics, the proportions and the details have to contribute to deliver something completely unique”.
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http://www.aguery.com/
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Text: Agustín Velasco
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This interview was published on Neo2 Spring issue, you can reed more articles like this in FREE ISSUES
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