This being the fashion industry—which for all its claims of endless pursuit of the future, tends toward the nostalgic—there is in the air a current yen for the ’90s, when, by all accounts, fashion felt looser, freer, more personable, more charismatic, and as so aptly pointed out by Vogue’s own Sarah Mower, when today’s crop of young designers were actually very young and liable to absorb what was around them. And chances are, a lot of what was around them was by Jean Colonna. Who, for the record, is having none of it. “I am not really interested in nostalgia,” says the Algerian-born, Paris-based Colonna, who welcomed a reporter into the bright intimacy of his year-old Marais boutique amid racks hung with his collection for Spring 2016. “I like to be outside of the whole fashion cycle now,” says the designer, who launched his company over a quarter of a century ago when he came up with Martin Margiela and Helmut Lang, and who speaks authoritatively about the particular brilliance of Miuccia Prada (“I am a fan,” he says with a shrug, “I forget who said it, that she destroys the bourgeois from the inside out”). “I see what’s going on in the business, the more and more and more of it . . . but the woman for whom I design is the same woman that she has always been. I have the same vision for women that I’ve always had.”
That vision translates into gauzy, transparent Nepalese cashmere not-so-basics like perfectly rendered tops and narrow-hewn dresses in creamy whites and neutrals (“When we first started using nude in the ’90s, it was shocking,” recalls Colonna, “now, it’s like khaki”). There are also tones of marigold, azure, pale lime, and black, in T-shirts rendered without seams—simple shaped separates that are meant to be layered, that feel luxurious, and that can be wadded up into pouches for easy transportation. Thick-strapped tank tops (the kind you imagine the infamous troupe of supers lived in during the early ’00s, or Angelina Jolie while filming Gia) look like the type of things that are so ubiquitous as to now be rendered anonymous, only nobody does them just right—well, Colonna does. A soft perforated-leather bomber jacket is paired with a floor-length dress; thin ribbed knits top trousers and glide down toward the ankle—the lines are long and lean, and all is sheer and sexy and very, very wearable. “For me, it’s not about fashion, it’s not about a trend, it’s about creating pieces that the women who come into the shop can fold into their lives,” says Colonna, and nostalgia or no, it looks as though there’ll be increasing reason for them to come to him to do it.
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