Autumn-Winter 2023/2024 — Splendor and rigor. Dress and habitat. Planning and passion. Visionary and pragmatism. Imagination and realism. Authority and confidentiality. Experimentation and simplification. The idea of a fashion as a distillation of a thought that crosses artistic or architectural practices rather than those of a volatile creativity, condemned to constant change.
The choice of a dress intellectual like Marc Audibet to enliven the conceptual legacy of Mila Schön seemed the most natural and coherent due to the many points of connection between the two creators. «Like me, Mila wanted a wardrobe for an international, demanding and refined clientele. His models had the obvious simplicity, rigorous and generous cuts that also offer well-being to the spirit, which in turn contributes to the freedom of the body. The influence of modern art led her to think of modern, effective garments, in the name of intelligent beauty», reflects Audibet. Both think and have thought of comfort and new formulas of elegance through the study of innovative materials and processes: the stretch fibers in single and double face versions invented by him like the legendary double conceived by her, travel in parallel with the obstinate search for a design that manifests a happy relationship between physicality and clothing. Elegance as a line: this is their common, indelible contribution. Proof that good ideas, in design but not only, resist adamantly over time and the seasons. Theirs is a research that feeds on "reductionism" and consists in the decomposition of a complex phenomenon into its constituent elements. Working by subtraction, we thus arrive at the substance of a work that combines lines and shapes to support a moving body that supports a creation where the essential is privileged over the spectacular. The collection develops through elements that define a clothing lexicon where every single creation, season after season, becomes a new lemma. It is no coincidence that, for a-i 2023/24, one of the projects around which the philosophy of the "new" Schön style is condensed is a bag - called Shadow - with extremely pure and calibrated lines, where the golden and the tapered oval plant inaugurates a system of organic designs.
Surely corroborated by double cashmere dresses and capes with an impalpable touch, absolutely modern because they cannot be referred to any specific gender and therefore potentially suitable for everyone, in the belief that designing clothes is also a political gesture. The large yokes - also double - are draped around the body according to the millenary science of statuesque draping, the cardigan jackets of various lengths have no buttons, and the garments with a sporty allure can be combined independently with all the others. It is a "seasonless textile Lego that follows the logic of an 'evolutionary classic'", says Audibet. The silhouette is tall, slender, verticalized by studies – such as the positioning of lean, long-limbed trousers in the pockets, which invites a straight posture, head held high. The final result is greater than the sum of its parts, because the personality of the wearer integrates the clothes, flattered by crêpe, silk, wool, or even linen, almost all in a double version with unexpected combinations. The color palette crowns black as the undisputed ruler, whose reign is interrupted by revolutionary flashes of purple, absinthe green, coral pink in some abstract prints inspired by the cuts of Lucio Fontana, of whom Mila Schön was a friend and collector. A collection that stands out for its timelessness but also for being perfectly in the mood of the times. "Simplicity is the sister of intelligence" is a quote from Constantin Brancusi that Audibet has made its own, where simplicity means the consequence of a careful construction for an aesthetic that wants to escape exaggerated consumerism. They are clothes and accessories that are designed to last, they recall a new art of living that takes us to a simply contemporary dimension. Archetypes, never stereotypes.
