Ten years, a first entry on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar, a new campaign fronted by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu and Satheene Sednaoui: this season, Maison Alexandra Golovanoff is marking the highlights of an anniversary it does not wish to treat as a mere review, but as a stage of acceleration. It is in this context that it unveils an exclusive collaboration with Le Costes.
Choosing to mark a decade of existence with a collaboration rather than a retrospective says something about how the house sees its own story: less a heritage to commemorate than a trajectory to extend. The entry on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar, in particular, places Alexandra Golovanoff in a different category from that of a still-emerging brand — a change of status that the collaboration with an institution as established as Le Costes reinforces rather than contradicts.
The partnership is no marriage of convenience. A few steps from the Alexandra Golovanoff flagship on rue du Mont-Thabor, Le Costes has long been part of the designer’s Paris — a legendary address in the heart of the city, which belongs as much to Parisians as to visitors from around the world. A familiar place, she says, where she feels at home, notably thanks to the friendship that binds her to its founder, Jean-Louis Costes, whose entrepreneurial spirit and singular vision she admires. He is, for that matter, equally generous with praise in return: “20 years brushing past each other… 2 years getting to know each other, getting to know each other better… And Alexandra Golovanoff proposes to me… I love it, I love everything, I love it strongly!!!”
The collaboration summons, in the background, two generations of the same taste. The historic Hôtel Costes, imagined by Jacques Garcia, echoes the neoclassical world of the designer’s parents, in which she grew up. The new Costes, decorated by Christian Liaigre, corresponds, she says, more to her tastes today — two aesthetic sensibilities that answer each other and feed her imagination as a designer.
From this double lineage comes a very simple question, at the origin of the capsule: what do we want to wear when we return to Le Costes after a frantic day in Paris? Conceived as a unisex wardrobe, the collection brings together a cotton and cashmere jogging bottom and sweatshirt, a leather cap, a T-shirt embroidered with the collaboration’s logo, as well as the Mila cardigan — the house’s emblematic model — offered for the occasion in an exclusive Costes colour. Pieces designed to give nothing away on style, to be worn in one’s room before going down for a coffee, stopping by the spa or heading out into Paris.
The choice of the Mila cardigan as the centrepiece of this capsule is no accident: a model already identified with the label, it allows the collaboration to remain legible as an Alexandra Golovanoff product before being a Costes product, the exclusive colour alone signing the belonging to this shared parenthesis rather than upsetting the house’s silhouette. A way of collaborating without dissolving, when so many other hotel capsules choose on the contrary to make a clean sweep of the guest brand’s usual wardrobe.
“Jean-Louis is unique, and Le Costes resembles him,” sums up Alexandra Golovanoff. “I admire his vision, his integrity, and I love the friend he has become. At Le Costes, I feel at home, but I keep dreaming. That is rather rare.” The collaboration will be available exclusively at Le Costes and at the house’s Paris flagship — an apartment wardrobe, in short, for a friendship that is anything but.
Cette publication est également disponible en :
