Maison N°9
Autumn–Winter MMXXVI
Issue nine · Structure
Three looks on what holds a garment up — and one day of film, uncut.
Sommaire
In this issue
Every season the word is silhouette, and every season the silhouette is really a question of engineering. Issue nine looks under the cloth: at the shoulder that stands without a body, the silk that finds its shape mid-air, the bag built over a single frame.
Structure is not stiffness. It is the decision, made early, about where a thing is allowed to move.
— V. Aubert, rédactrice
Look I
Ivory double-face wool · concrete, 10 a.m.
The shoulder as architecture
A shoulder is architecture before it is fashion. This one is cut at forty-five degrees and left hollow inside — no padding, only canvas — so the wool holds a pose the body merely borrows.
Stand it on a chair and it stands. That was the brief.
Look II
Crimson silk twill · open sky, before the rain
Structure in motion
Structure is not always rigid. Six metres of crimson twill, one gust, and the drape engineers itself mid-air — every fold a load path, held for a two-hundred-fiftieth of a second.
We waited four hours for this wind. It was worth the light we lost.
« A garment stands the way a building stands — from the inside. »
Look III
Vegetable-tanned leather · travertine plinth, studio
Structure you carry
The issue closes at rest. One interior frame, leather left to slump against it, silver cast from actual branches — structure worn on the outside, for once.
Colophon
How this issue was made
© MMXXVI Maison N°9, Paris · a design study — every garment, name and atelier is fictional