PARIS — As the men’s spring 2024 season opens in Paris with a Pharrell-shaped bang at Louis Vuitton, brands from around the world are vying for attention on an effervescent schedule. Among those WWD has its eye on are Toyko-based Bed j.w. Ford, Parisian label C.R.E.O.L.E., Lagos Space Programme and 4SDesigns.
Bed J.W. Ford
Back on June 25, 2015, designer Shinpei Yamagishi was found attending the Raf Simons show in Paris and that’s where the idea of showing his own label in the French capital started to coalesce.
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Eight years later to the day, that’s exactly what he will do with the official debut of Bed J.W. Ford, the label he founded in 2010 with Keisuke Kosaka, now the visual director of the brand.
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Born in a fishing village in the Ishikawa prefecture on the coast of the Sea of Japan, Yamagishi grew up admiring the fashions of big cities like Tokyo and Paris from a distance. He’d been developing his personal take on fashion through observation but the true bolt out of the blue that cinched his path into fashion design was discovering the work of designer Takahiro Miyashita and his Number (N)ine brand.
“If that person had started a women’s line, I would probably be doing one as well,” he told WWD through a translator, explaining he admired both the brand and Miyashita’s personality.
After graduating from high school, he headed to Tokyo to pursue fashion. But rather than go down the classic route of enrolling in a design or fashion college, Yamagishi dove straight into the industry, working as sales staff in a vintage clothing store before starting in PR and sales.
In 2010 he launched Bed J.W. Ford out of a small apartment and started offering a vision of dressed up but unfussy elegance that got him the attention of buyers, press and other labels. His first full collection was showcased at Tokyo Fashion Week in 2016 and he won its 2017 award.
The brand now counts some 50 stockists around the world and is priced between 130 euros for T-shirts and 260 euros for shirts and an average of 400 euros for trousers. Coats come in less than 1,000 euros.
Invited as a guest designer at Pitti Uomo 94 in 2018 to present a collaboration with Adidas Originals and a runway show, Yamagishi went on to show at Milan Fashion Week and collaborated with the likes of Lee and Maison Mihara Yasuhiro. A guerrilla show in January 2020 was meant to mark his debut in Paris, but for the pandemic.
Asked what his favorite part of the design process is, Yamagishi described textures and the sensation of textiles on the skin as the beginning of each season, saying that his inspirations derived from his personal observations on the intimate beauty and delicacy of everyday lives.
For spring 2024, he tapped into the cusp of adulthood, with that languid impression of a morning after a long night when thoughts and sensations are still fuzzy, telescoping the image of a grown-up man with that languid limberness of youth. — LILY TEMPLETON
C.R.E.O.L.E.
Having his own fashion label “wasn’t the plan,” said Vincent Frederic-Colombo, the 33-year-old designer behind C.R.E.O.L.E., a three-year old brand that was 10 years in the making. “I even constructed my brand in reverse, starting with its visual universe before even getting to the clothes.”
Paris-born Frederic-Colombo was raised in Guadeloupe, the French overseas region in the Caribbean. After graduating in product design, pursuing a dual sociology and anthropology degree, and a stint at the HEAD Geneva art and design school, he eased his way into fashion by joining Paris-based retailer Kokon To Zai. In parallel, he laid down the foundation for his label in 2013, when he began working with photographer and plastician Fanny Viguier on a multidisciplinary project celebrating the French Caribbean identity.
When the pandemic hit, the ensuing lockdown afforded Frederic-Colombo the opportunity to lay down the foundations for a full-fledged fashion label, including a reflection around the name, deemed to be a remnant of colonial tropes. He ultimately decided to rename the brand “Consciousness Relative to Emancipation Overcoming Obstacles” — C.R.E.O.L.E., in short.
“If you just try to escape [the implications of the name], that will not change the purpose. So [the brand name] is about showing another way, [having] another way to explain where we are,” he said.
Workwear is the bedrock of the brand, inflected with a dash of tailoring and peppered with delicate techniques lifted from the womenswear space, such as lace and crochet. Humor also comes into play — courtesy of his six years working with Bernhard Wilhelm — with items such as crochet jockstraps or boxer shorts revisited with delicate ruching. With retail prices starting around 100 euros and going up to 500 euros for jackets, the designer wants to keep his work affordable.
His spring 2024 collection will pay homage to “Coco-La-Fleur, Candidat,” a 1979 French drama following a gentle Guadeloupean man who gets roped into an electoral scheme orchestrated by Parisian politicians, considered to be the first film from the French Antilles.
Frederic-Colombo intends his work as a commentary on how those who emerge from the post-colonial space express themselves. “It’s interesting to show we can propose something different from the pleasant, joyful Caribbean cliché of exoticism,” rooting the label in a community that is “always living in crisis, always with limits so they try to find joy on the hard reality,” he said. — L.T.
Lagos Space Programme
Fresh off winning the Woolmark Prize, Nigerian designer Adeju Thompson is bringing the Lagos Space Programme label to Paris after two seasons in Milan. Titled “Cloth as Queer Archive,” the spring collection will be shown at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday as part of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode’s Sphere showroom.
Billed as a dialogue between Africa and the West celebrating the merino wool fiber and its versatility, the nonbinary line melds tailored pieces, some lined with the indigo-dyed Adire cloth made in southwestern Nigeria, and looser pieces like the label’s signature Yoruba wide pants, which are especially popular in Japan.
Thompson was excited to walk in the footsteps of design heroes like Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo and Raf Simons, who all made their name in the French capital.
“I love what Raf did in the early Aughts and why those shows were important. I want to be that person. I want to share where I come from, you know. I want to create shows that really spark the imagination and I’m excited that I won the Woolmark Prize, so it means that there is this momentum with me,” Thompson said.
The designer has been spending time in Europe as part of a residency at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, where they’ve explored a trove of historical Nigerian costumes collected by anthropologist Brigitte Menzel in the ‘60s. In addition to visiting museums and galleries, Thompson has picked up vintage pieces from the ‘30s to the ‘50s for their archive.
“I see myself as an eternal student of fashion and I’m very aware of fashion history, and have tried to frame LSP as a label that is trying to create a very fresh conversation,” they said. “I know that’s something that’s very hard to do in fashion because everything has been said and done, but I do feel like Lagos Space Programme has something very unique to contribute to the global dialogue.” — JOELLE DIDERICH
4SDesigns
Angelo Urrutia is no stranger to fashion. Born in El Salvador, he migrated to New York as a child and since embracing the apparel industry as a career, has worked for a variety of brands including Barbour, Reebok, New Balance, Adidas, Hoka and, most notably, Nepenthes America, the U.S. arm of the Japanese retailer and owner of Engineered Garments, Needles and other brands, for which he had worked for more than two decades.
At Nepenthes, he oversaw the opening of its New York store as well as its collaborations with brands as varied as Adidas and Trickers.
But in October 2019, he decided it was time to branch out on his own and the result was 4SDesigns, a line of modern American sportswear crafted in Italy and centered around comfort, lightness and performance. Urrutia launched the line in Paris in January 2020 in a temporary space he found in the city. “I didn’t have a showroom, or PR — I was just on my own,” he recalled. “And we landed very good accounts: Mr Porter, Ssense, lots of independents. It was a really great start — and then COVID-19 happened.”
Luckily his experience had taught him the infrastructure he needed to establish before creating a collection, so he was able to produce and ship his line.
His good luck has continued, with his collection now being sold in Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Kith and other retailers in the U.S., as well as a number of stores in Italy, Ireland, England, the Netherlands, Sweden and Asia.
He also caught the attention of the team at the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, which selected him as one of its finalists for this year’s $300,000 award, as well as the Federation de la Haute Couture in Paris, which invited him onto the official calendar. The 4SDesigns presentation will be on Sunday.
“We’re going to do a small presentation because it wasn’t necessarily in the bandwidth for us to do anything big at the moment,” he said. “But you can’t really say no to that opportunity.”
The collection he’ll show in Paris will be true to the brand’s DNA, which Urrutia described as “a very particular American experience with a New York lens.”
“I have very high esteem for the classics of Seventh Avenue like Perry Ellis and Ralph Lauren who are the pinnacle of modern American design,” he said. “I try to take European savoir faire and Americanize it. For better or worse, it’s not precious, it’s more tactile for every day.”
That translates into everything from suit separates to yoga outfits designed with vintage and military references.
Urrutia also designs around 80 percent of his fabrics so he can better “tell my story in a multilayered fashion that resonates with my customer base.”
For his spring collection, he will showcase his take on casual dress-up in long-sleeve shirts and short blazers in lightweight fabrics that pay homage to 1950s jazz musicians. Many of the more tailored pieces have linings — “I always love linings in the summertime” — and he experimented with a deconstructed blazer that he described as “almost backless. I wanted to really attack the idea of getting dressed up in the warmth,” he said.
He addressed that through the fabrics, which include a striped organza that looks like seersucker but is printed with an abstract floral camo pattern.
“And then I always juxtapose that with my idea of workwear,” he continued. “I have a utility pant that’s a double knee pant in a silk sateen with very beautiful drape and movement. It’s Americana but soft and tender.”
He also pointed to a raffia striped tweed that he created with the French mill Bacus that he will use for a work shirt in order to “humanize it more.” And the collection features a lot of silk — a new fabric for 4SDesigns.
Looking beyond Paris, Urrutia said he will work to “stabilize the pace of it all and get my rhythm, really bond with my customer base, create my community, gather my tribe.”
That tribe tends to be older and professional, but he has discovered that his line appeals to a wide swath of people. “I cast a big net because America is such a dynamic place, full of so many different cultures and subcultures. I put a lot of my central American background in the line, but at its core, it’s American sportswear,” he said.
He had done trunk shows last year that were successful and he also created some special product for his wholesale accounts such as Nordstrom. A pop-up that he opened in New York City was also a win.
Even if he doesn’t win the CFDA prize, 4SDesigns still has one investor, Enzo Ricci, an entertainment executive from 3 Marys Entertainment who wanted to get into fashion, who is helping finance the business. “He lets me work at my own pace, which is very liberating and freeing to me,” he said. — JEAN E. PALMIERI