MONTBLANC Appoints Marco Tomasetta As New Creative Director

MONTBLANC CEO announced the appointment of Marco Tomasetta as Creative Director recently - a graduate on Instituto Europeo di Design in Milan, Tomasetta has extensive experience in leather goods and accessories, having worked for numerous renowned fashion brands including Prada, Chloe and Louis Vuitton. Most recently, has was Creative Director Men's and Women's leather Goods at Givenchy.

“We are thrilled to have Marco bring his creative leadership and vision to Montblanc to accelerate its evolution as the Maison of Luxury Business-Lifestyle. Marco is an agile and dynamic innovator who is also committed to the value of fine craftsmanship and timeless design that have always been central to Montblanc’s identity. He understands the importance of overarching brand themes across all Montblanc categories, and I am looking forward to him working with our team to refine them in a compelling way. Even though our iconic emblem will remain at the heart of everything we do, we are committed to further breaking boundaries when designing products that appeal to both existing and new clients, mirroring their shifting lifestyles and needs,” says Nicolas Baretzki, Montblanc CEO.

“I am excited to join Montblanc, a storied Maison known for its rich heritage and its uncompromising focus on substance through the design and functionality of its products. As a designer, writing and drawing are the starting points of any design process, which is why I was immediately drawn to Montblanc - fusing tradition with pioneering design. I am looking forward to collaborating with Nicolas and the team to chart a new creative vision for the brand that bridges icons like the Meisterstück with new design concepts across product categories that will appeal to this new Montblanc Luxury Business-Lifestyle mindset. Furthermore, there is something incredibly meaningful about being assigned the task of fulfilling the Maison’s goal of creating perfect companions that will grow with their owners and become part of their accomplishments,” explains Marco Tomasetta, Montblanc Creative Director.

JIMMY CHOO X MARINE SERRE Spring 2021 Collaboration Collection

Jimmy Choo collaborates with leading Parisian designer Marine Serre - whose body-conscious and environmentally-attuned clothes have fast made her a pivotal figure in the contemporary fashion scene. Inspired by Serre’s commitment to ergonomic and kinetic clothing, influenced by athletes and designed to move with the rhythms of modern life, the streamlined silhouettes of the collaboration highlight the shared ethos of both brands: comfort and respect for the body, without compromising style.

A tightly-focused offer of six key styles, the Jimmy Choo x Marine Serre capsule collection helps delineate the narrative of Marine Serre’s SS2021 collection and accompanying film, created in collaboration with directors Sacha Barbin and Ryan Doubiago. Each style denotes a different character - a distinct identity, a new facet of a wearer, underscoring each total look they are designed to be an integral part of. The inspiration is drawn from the Jimmy Choo archives: the vintage FARO, from AW2000, is the starting-point, its proportions examined anew. Attuned to Marine Serre’s constant interest in renewal and regeneration, it is a reinvention for today.

The silhouette of the FARO - an elongated pointed toe, a lower heel with a sportif attitude and freedom of movement - defines the offering. The collection comprises a wardrobe of classics: a 100mm heel pump; a Mary Jane, ankle-boot, sock ankle-boot and sock calf-boot, all with 50mm heel; and the knee-high KATO flat boot.

“Marine Serre is an exciting talent - her innovation and experimentation grabbed my attention. Her designs are bold, confident and inherently feminine - which is perfectly attuned to our language at Jimmy Choo. Marine has her own ethos and way of thinking about the future and it felt right for us to collaborate. It was refreshing to see her perspective on our DNA, our archive - how she would remix Jimmy Choo. I’m always intrigued by the mindset of the future, there is still so much to exchange.” Sandra Choi, Creative Director Jimmy Choo.

“I really enjoyed collaborating with such an iconic brand as Jimmy Choo, because of its heritage, unique savoir-faire and for its consolidated experience in shoe design and production. Sandra and I had an immediate connection during the creative process; she fully understood my perspective and it was exciting to see how we could merge the two brand’s identities into a hybrid product, that could reflect the feminine aesthetic of JC and our futuristic approach towards practicality and comfort.” Marine Serre, Founder and Creative director MARINE SERRE.

The colour palette is sharp: black, white, tan and red. All styles feature Marine Serre’s leitmotif crescent logo: some an evolution, a bi-color “Half Moon” shape executed on recycled jersey, alongside calf printed with Serre’s all-over Moon. Drawing from the world of high-performance sports, stretch jersey is used for the sock-boots at ankle and calf, and all styles combined their jersey and calf with rubber details in contrasting textures and hues. Inherently feminine, the styles are also dynamic, engineered for movement: walking, running, cycling, designs that are sensual hybrids between sportswear, streetwear and high fashion. The KATO boot, referential to the soft-soled, flexible fabric boots worn for boxing and martial arts, is the most obvious crossover, but all styles borrow from the universe of sports. They add to a reflection of the way we dress - and live - today.

BALLY Introduces New Styles In Bally Lift Collection

BALLY's new styles of Bally Lift collection offers new ways to wear the brand’s contemporary signature sneaker as well as personalization options available in select stores worldwide. First introduced for AW2020, the Bally Lift’s ultra-light rubber sole and sleek details have made it an immediate best-seller and recognizable brand silhouette. Latest arrivals for men include the Melvin, the final word in style versatility thanks to a fully tonal look across leather, lace and sole. Moony strikes a retro-sporty look with perforated detailing to the toe cap and the iconic Bally Stripe to the side panel. Further brand details are visible on the Miky, with an all-over B-Chain motif and Bally stamp logo in celebration of the brand’s 170-year anniversary in 2021.

A new colorway in the women’s Maxim strikes a harmonious look in clean white and blush pink detailing, while the Malya features a detachable press patch to the heel with interchangeable tonal and shining crystal patches, making for a variety of ways to wear. The patch can be personalized in select Bally boutiques with hot-stamped letters and symbols, making for a special gift for sneaker lovers or a way to truly make the Bally Lift your own.

LEONARD PARIS Presents Silky Wave

Silky Wave Sail away, with passion, desire and joyfulness. It is through a short film with a road-movie texture that Leonard Paris has chosen to present the SSS2021 collection, imagined by Creative Director, Christine Phung. Staged by the ocean, incarnated by two models, Margot and Maren, and professional surfer, Nina Reynal that the latter comes to life. Free, athletic and blissful, the heroines in the film luminously embody today’s modern women, traveling in a Volkswagen retro combi, with pit stops as they please to better experiment the ocean and its promises at daylight, and cherish the warm summer evenings at dusk.

With the Hawaiian shirt and its thousand possibilities as common denominator, Leonard Paris has imagined a solar and versatile collection, in which the artisanal know-how and riches of the Maison’s innovative techniques combine and position themselves at the service of beauty.

The iconic and signature orchid merges with palms, hibiscus flowers and wave foam on loose and supple blouses, light silk jersey jumpsuits, airy ponchos and kimonos, a cotton coat, quilted silk seersucker and long pleated evening dresses pleated in silk crepe. The surfers’ wardrobe is moreover emphasized through technical details affixed to short dresses or wetsuits in neoprene and mesh, as well as colorful swimsuits and a hoodie sweatshirt printed with the Maison’s inimitable color palette. 

The movie features an authentic surfboard made off Leonard Paris prints, as well as kites designed from shawls and silk scarves, becoming essential characters of this dream journey. Poetic, enthusiastic and colorful, the SS2021 Leonard Paris silhouette is unquestionably optimistic. A true ode to freedom found.

LANVIN Spring 2021 Men's & Women's Collection - mylifestylenews' Bonus Pick

LANVIN Spring 2021 Men's & Women's Collection  is a dream as reality - a fantasy of fashion. Creative director Bruno Sialelli explores the notion of reverie, of memories real and make-believe, of fantastical characters and invented narratives.

A dialogue between the real and the imaginary informs the collection, just as the clothes themselves are an interplay of masculine and feminine, for him and for her. Captured in stills and motion image, the models become an ensemble cast, heroes and heroines of an unfolding drama.

Looks are devised in total - ensembles for the ensemble. They have gestures of quintessential Frenchness - blouses, foulards, slender tailleurs, eased suiting, a soft, soothed palette of sunbleached neutrals and pastel.

Outfits are carefully composed, with gloves, shoes, turban hats, sunglasses, referential to the glamour of interwar couture, and the fantasy of fashion proposed by cinema. Alongside the dream, reality.

Fabrics are honest, natural and true: silk, wool, cotton, cashmere, leather. They anchor the imagination, offering luxury with inherent value, quality and longevity.

Devised during lockdown, inspired by fleeting images drawn from movies and glimpses of magazine editorials, these images are fantasies of fashion. They are simultaneously reflective of a subconscious desire for escape, adventure - joie de vivre, recaptured again.

Subconscious versus conscious: there are echoes of key Lanvin styles, the ever-expanding vocabulary of the Maison, here refined and honed. Lanvin's emblem, designed in 1923 by Paul Iribe, inscribes buttons rounded like the bottle of the 1927 Lanvin parfum Arpège: Lanvin blue is a key shade.

The Modernist, rectilinear ‘Pencil’ bag, its contrasting feline zoomorphic hardware created in homage to Jeanne Lanvin’s collaboration with designer Armand Albert Rateau, is reiterated; the pillowy ‘Sugar’ bag, an accessory icon of Lanvin devised in the mid-2000s, is revived, rescaled, revisited. Jewelry underscores the house.

The ‘Arpege’ line, inspired by the fragrance’s flaçon and stopper, is joined by bijou based on petals of flowers, namely the rose and daisy - Marguerite was the name of Jeanne Lanvin’s daughter. Here, nature is sublimated into parures of cascading cast-metal petals.

Lanvin has always been a house based on collaboration, on community - as important today as it was to Jeanne Lanvin. Evoking the 1920s, when the Maison reached global prominence, Lanvin collaborates with the estate of the artist Romain de Tirtoff, known by his nom de plume of Erté.

An aesthetic synonymous with that decade, a selection of different Erté artworks are used as prints. Their imagery - women selecting clothing, jaguars referent to the ‘Pencil’ bag’ - seem like illustrations fictionalizing real-life as it happens, as surreal automatic drawings reveal subconscious desires.

The environment of the collection’s imagery epitomizes these ideas: Le Palais Idéal, an extraordinary example of naïve art architecture executed by Ferdinand Cheval, a French postman who literally made his dream. Built over thirty-three years at the turn of the twentieth century, his fantastical reimagining of a medieval castle became a point of homage and pilgrimage to artists such as André Breton, Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst. Anaïs Nin celebrated his achievement in an essay.

Here, the Ideal Palace becomes a total work of art, framing clothes devised for its imaginary inhabitants. Fantasizing fashion, realizing dreams. Voila, Lanvin.

Dior Cruise 2021 Collection - mylifestylenew's Top 10's Pick

Dior Cruise 2021 Collection is a choral work that celebrates the memory, values, culture and future of exceptional craftsmanship. In an experimental expression of ancestral savoir-faire, fabrics from the Le Costantine Foundation are used for a series of jackets, including the emblematic Bar. The motto of this unique place, “Amando e Cantando1”, is woven on the back of skirts.

“During this period, I sought to give collective efforts a new dimension. Despite the disadvantages of distance, bringing a different perspective to our daily lives has given us strength and imagination,” says Maria Grazia Chiuri, who for this Cruise show has chosen to reconnect her creative passion with the region of Puglia, a place close to her heart.

Texts by the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino dedicated to the region’s traditions – which have influenced authors including Germano Celant and Georges Didi-Huberman – led her to explore their roots.

Puglia and its different energies, where magical beliefs such as Tarantism live on, have become in this particular context a concrete form of utopia, a new reading of the world.

Echoing the iconic, flower-embroidered Miss Dior dress by Christian Dior, artist Pietro Ruffo imagines a field studded with ears of wheat evoking a summer landscape. A narrative of untamed nature is transposed onto long, light cotton dresses, shirts and shorts.

Composing a symbolic writing inspired by the illustrations featured in the book De Florum Cultura – published by Giovanni Battista Ferrari in 1638 – Pietro Ruffo created five drawings of flowers adorned with adages such as “Les parfums sont les sentiments des fleurs2” (Perfumes are the feelings of flowers).

Maria Grazia Chiuri also wished to pay homage to the Luminarie that magnify and sublimate public squares and monuments with their luminous architecture.

A craft that has given life to a figurative motif on multicolored scarves, and is referenced in openwork and embroidered embellishments.

These illuminations are reinterpreted by the artist Marinella Senatore, whose committed work honors participatory art.

This collection is an example of the collective intelligence the Creative Director champions, combined with the extraordinary power of rhythms and rituals, music and dance, as a way of transcending oneself.