When you’re under 30 and you’re launching your second independent boutique, it takes a hell of a lot of courage. A boldness, a beautiful boldness. “ Sometimes it’s not easy: people give me advice on the paint, on how to present the clothes (…) They tell me what’s wrong”. Caroline Bourgine listens, but more importantly, she listens to herself.
Her second boutique, 8 rue de l’échaudé, opened a month ago. Inside: art books, Agnès Varda film posters and a fern. Not just a boutique, but a space where fashion lives and clothes tell their own stories.
With the fall-winter 2018 collection just launched, she’s already thinking ahead to the next season, and is bringing to fruition a project close to her heart: bringing all her manufacturing together in Paris, in her boutique-atelier on rue Racine.
From inspiration to country idyll
Over the past three years a wardrobe Bourgine has taken shape: trapeze skirts, velvets and printed T-shirts full of humor and wit. For this collection, Caroline pays tribute to Georges Sand. “ I’ve been wanting to create something around the style of late 19th-century dress for a long time: I was thinking of Les Malheurs de Sophie.”In the end, the figure of Georges Sand is the rallying point for this winter.It has imposed itself.” For months, Caroline lived with the novelist “not in the mystical sense, but she was part of my daily life”. Reading of his autobiography, and visit to Nohant where the “countryside” was photographed. “A magical place. I was able to walk near the Mare au diable…” The result of these wanderings into the recesses of the French countryside and the twists and turns of the 19th century is a collection full of capes and long coats. Shirts in floral prints “inspired by an illustration by Nahum Gutman”, and velvets in unique pinks.
Images that become clothes: fashion’s magical process
“During Heritage Days, I was always curious to visit the workshops of the great couture houses. I found it fascinating: the needles, the machines. I wanted to understand where clothes came from. I was never disappointed. Today, it’s my daily routine, and I’d like my customers to take part in it”. The boutique-atelier at 15 rue Racine: a promise, a wish, that Caroline is gradually fulfilling. Caroline’s pattern maker, Suzy, already occupies the premises: ” Here she’s in the workshop, welcoming customers. For us, this place is as important as the boutique”. . Sharing her time between two boutiques, imagining new collections that respond to made-in-Paris manufacturing standards, and thinking about the experience customers have when they walk through her doors: a complete program. I‘ve received a lot of good advice,” she says, “and it’s never easy to start out on your own. She stays the course: her latest boutique articulates all the inspirations of her previous collections; and says what she is, what she is Bourgine. A boutique-museum, where the promise of a cloudless tomorrow shines through. Caroline shows us an illustration by Marie De Beaucourt, whom she discovered about 3 years ago on Instagram: just in time, she signs the print for a t-shirt in the collection!
Instagram @_bourgine
Like the women who inspire her, Caroline Bourgine steers her own course, far from the devils of the fashion pond. A handsome little devil in his prime…
Talking about her latest collection is like humming Brassens, like being overwhelmed by the magic of Méliès‘ aesthetic. It radiates that something unique. Her determination is reminiscent of an Agnès B.
Meeting point 8 rue de l’échaudé, Paris 6
or online at http://www.bourgine.net
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