VOGUE: Zimmermann SPRING 2025 READY-TO-WEAR
Despite the murky currents and prevailing winds buffeting luxury right now, Zimmermann is riding a wave. A new SoHo store just opened in New York, and 14 more outposts will follow before the end of next year. During our preview, Nicky Zimmermann said the latest ETA on the house’s Paris studio is six months: “It’s going to be amazing. We’re going to have a full atelier so I’m going to be working between Australia and here, which is pretty incredible.”
This show tried to lessen that distance. As they entered the Palais de Tokyo space, the audience was shown snippets from a 1970s Aussie surf movie named Morning of the Earth. Its sun-drenched footage (which can be seen in a remastered trailer on YouTube) showed boy and girl surfers shaping boards and raising chooks and carving waves in Australia and Indonesia. Zimmermann said she’d been in touch with its Bellingen-based director, Albert “Albe” Falzon, both to secure permission and to discuss the collection. “He’s unreal,” she said: “a gorgeous man. And we had the same vision of the light in Australia, and what it does to colors. I was trying to explain how I wanted to bring that through, and reflect the movement of surfing in the flow of the clothing, and use fabrics that looked like liquid.”
Zimmermann’s opening look set the tone: a dress in marine blue organza with a braided macramé bodice from which flowed sets of wave like ruffles. There was a series of core day pieces, cropped trenches and strappy utility shorts and shirt dresses in soft and springy viscose drill that would return in various fabrications as we progressed. There was an Aloha print that showed kangaroos amongst the palms. A skirt and a crinolined dress in organdy shot with fine-filament metal at looks 40 and 41 really did share the same blissful shine of sun bouncing off ocean.
The theme helped Zimmermann and her team develop some really interesting propositions. Jersey dresses in bronze were built around sections of wetsuit-sturdy neoprene that provided both stability and a platform from which the fabric could flow. Little details, like a pair of super-light cotton corduroy trousers or the shell and carved dolphin necklaces, were satisfyingly consistent with old school, lo-fi surf culture. Bags included fringed rattan baskets and a slouchy mid-sized leather one whose strap was set against hardware shaped to resemble a rack of boards. A cropped smock top in what looked like raw linen voile was edged with wavelets and embroidered with a sunray-surrounded yin and yang mandala design. Neither too literally surf nor too literally 1970s, this collection adapted the Eden-like spirit Falzon captured in his movie, then demonstrated how appealingly it sits adjacent to the Zimmermann ethos of joyful and fun self-expression through clothes.