One of France’s oldest couture houses, blessed with an impressive archive of delicate embroideries, Lanvin can still find willing customers for exceptional evening dresses with six-figure price tags.
But creative director Peter Copping is also eager to further broaden the Lanvin wardrobe into daytime pursuits, and to reach a wider clientele with items at more approachable price points.
These were the two main thrusts of his handsome pre-fall collection for the house, strong on roomy coats and close-fitting knit tailoring, and peppered with fashion items that won’t break the bank, including merino wool sweaters with cute grosgrain ribbon detailing at the top of the spine, and vaguely Art Deco LBDs hemmed with short, sparkly fringe.
The jumping-off point for Copping was documentation of a trip founder Jeanne Lanvin made to Venice with her niece Marianne in the ’20s — which directly inspired some black-and-white ensembles, the Fortuny pleating, and the punches of Venetian red here and there — along with his own penchant for midcentury Murano vessels and figurines, which could be felt in the mottled prints, the sinuous dress silhouettes, and the long chain necklaces festooned with blobs of colored glass.
Blanket-like skirts with an A-line shape were a subliminal wink to travel, and the flaring shape was repeated in cape-topped blouses and dresses, and some jackets.
Copping also threw in some “cooler silhouettes,” like his cropped coats in glossy black faux leather with a swooping cowl neckline, to appeal to a “new, maybe younger clientele,” he mused. “I wanted the lineup to feel very eclectic.”
He said he also wanted “things that felt realistic as well,” pointing to the voluminous coats tossed over leggings or loose trousers, a look he observes daily during his stroll to the office.
Copping has an identifiable hand in fashion, and he’s building up a distinctive vocabulary for Lanvin, including across accessories, where he updated the hardware on its popular Cat bag with something sleeker than the mother-daughter emblem of yore.
Like Lanvin, he’s also a fan of Venice. “What appeals to me is that it’s an incredibly historical city, but you have all this great modern art that you can see there as well,” he said. “So it doesn’t really feel like it’s set in time.”