Some collections begin with a word; Julie Kegels began with an apple. A Jonagold eaten every night before bed became a ritual, then the starting point for a reflection on what pulls us down—and what that says about us.
Since last March, the Belgian designer says her days have grown fuller: more people, more conversations, more responsibilities. Building a house while protecting the joy that gave rise to it has become, she says, the heaviest and most cherished part of her work. From that word—heavy—she developed an almost physical line of thought: gravity is not a fall; it gives weight to what matters. The more important something is, the more it bends the space around it. Nothing is pulling us down, she insists; we are simply following a natural curve.
That idea gave rise to a wardrobe that quite literally obeys gravity. Low-rise nylon tights, denim trousers, jersey and tailoring seem to slip from the body: shoulders pull away, edelweiss embroidery droops towards the floor, and the hems of dresses are weighted like a tablecloth. Ball gowns fall back into skirts; torn sequin bras leave only the outline of a cup. These clothes do not conceal the effort of remaining upright; they expose it.
Against this deliberate descent, one fabric resists: superorganza, swollen with everything in the process of falling—pigment, fragments of sequins, beads in little bags—which filter through the cloth and leave a trail behind each silhouette. Throughout the show, the house writes, the runway staged an almost classroom-like demonstration of gravity: a stretched fabric curving as soon as a mass is placed on it.
The collection also reveals an unusual form of press release: a first-person text, almost a letter, where most houses settle for a third-person summary of the styling. The signature—“Julie Kegels”—at the foot of a text about mental load, responsibility and business growth as much as cut and material says something about the moment the designer is living through: a house growing quickly enough for its founder to feel the need to explain it, season after season, in her own words rather than those of a press office.
Presented during Paris Fashion Week, on a calendar crowded with ever more spectacular proposals, Apple of the Day deliberately chooses introspection over display. It is a risky choice when attention is usually won by images rather than words, but one consistent with a collection that, from first look to last, rejects the easy appeal of spectacle in favour of an almost clinical examination of a feeling as ordinary as gravity.
Then there is the apple: the one said to have fallen on Newton’s head and the one Julie Kegels still eats each evening. Apple of the Day, she explains, is about falling in all its forms: falling short, falling under pressure, falling into place, falling in love. It is what brought her back to edelweiss, a flower reached only by climbing high enough to find it. Without gravity there would be nothing to climb against—and perhaps that is the only reason rising has meaning.
A collection that claims to resolve nothing. That is precisely its proposition: to accept weight rather than try to cast it off, and to make it a material for dressmaking instead of a burden to hide.
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