De Saint Sernin’s appointment signals a creative change for the company. Antonioli, who co-founded the New Guards Group, bought Ann Demeuelemeester in 2020 and until now has run it with an unnamed design team. Though she stepped away from her namesake label nearly a decade ago, Demeulemeester herself is tangentially involved. It’s an an unusual arrangement, but she and Antonioli are friends, and so she oversaw an exhibition of her archive at Pitti Uomo this summer and has given her blessing, it would seem, to collections made very much in her image.
Like Demeulemeester, De Saint Sernin was born in Belgium. The Paris-raised, l’ESAA Duperré-educated designer launched his eponymous label in 2017 and quickly garnered notice for the hedonism of his aesthetic and a binary-breaking approach to clothing design. De Saint Sernin is a proponent of what could be called equal opportunity nudity, putting all genders in sheer suits, crystal mesh tanks, lace-up briefs and “body-formatted” knits, and he has built a starry fanbase of It-girls and It-boys for them – Dua Lipa, Hailey Bieber, Bad Bunny and Troye Sivan among them.
His collection’s sex positive glamour is attention getting, but it also comes from the heart. He’s just as likely to be wearing his stretch tank top as Ms. Bieber is. “The way that I design for the brand is like a journal, it really is autobiographical,” he told Vogue recently.
The pictures the company has released suggest he’ll be taking a similar approach to his new gig. The Willy Vanderperre-lensed shots are portraits of De Saint Sernin in archival Ann Demeulemeester. In one he wears a black shearling collar, for the others he chose a single-breasted suit, a see-through knit, a one-shoulder sheath and a bias-cut silk maxi skirt. The press statement reads “authorship and autobiography gain centrality, as Ludovic de Saint Sernin shapes the Ann Demeulemeester traits around his vision, proclivities and individuality, offering a first-person reading and the connection with today’s audience that comes from that.”
In her time, Demeulemeester built her own cult of personality, making devotees who went back to her Couvent des Cordeliers location season after season for poetic shows full of fluidly constructed tailoring, slouched-on shirting, bias cut dresses and her signature butch-femme mix of leathers and feathers. Her celebrity muses included Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith.
In an interview with Vogue Runway’s Laird Borrelli-Persson on the eve of her Pitti exhibition, Demeulemeester said, “I was interested in the tension between masculine and feminine, but also the tension between masculine and feminine within one person, that is what makes every person really interesting to me because everybody is unique.” She and De Saint Sernin have that sentiment in common.
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