PARIS: After New York and London, the Briton Victoria Beckham is creating excitement by joining Paris Fashion Week, the most important fashion event of the year which begins on Monday and will have to dedicate her creative talent.
“It’s the arrival of a very fine brand. We are delighted that Victoria Beckham is among us” with the parade scheduled for September 30, said Pascal Morand, the executive president of the Federation of Haute Couture and Fashion.
With her entry into the official Parisian calendar, Victoria Beckham, 48, joins 104 French and international labels registered for this edition of the spring-summer 2023 ready-to-wear week.
Sign that the pandemic no longer weighs on the event, almost all the houses have opted for physical parades, whether heavyweights like Dior, Chanel, Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney or Issey Miyake or emerging brands like the French Weinsanto which opens the ball on Monday evening.
The ex-Spice Girl, who became a fashion designer in 2008, has so far participated in Fashion Weeks in London and New York but has not organized a fashion show since the health crisis in 2020.
She hasn’t attended a London Fashion Week, even online, for over a year and complained in an interview about the cost of hosting the shows.
Victoria Beckham, whose plan to get into fashion was at first astonishing, has proven herself. Its brand now boasts 250 points of sale in around fifty countries.
Her women’s wardrobe has always been appreciated by fashionistas and fashion priestess Anna Wintour who warned that she should “never be underestimated”.
– “Ready” for Paris –
Despite this support, the brand has struggled to make a profit and is heavily in debt, the British press recently reported.
To raise the bar, the Brit has called on major French players: Ralph Toledano, former president of the French Haute Couture and Fashion Federation as chairman of the board of directors and Marie Leblanc de Reynies, previously responsible for purchasing. of the Parisian department store Printemps as CEO.
“She is not from the fashion world, she got into this business and, at some point, it was necessary to structure, organize, put the house in order, everything that we have done for four years. », stresses Ralph Toledano.
“We are ready” to parade in Paris, he assures.
For the designer, the event “brings a kind of recognition”, comments to AFP Benjamin Simmenauer, professor at the IFM (French Institute of Fashion).
Paris Fashion Week “is the most prominent, it’s a way of being validated as a brand that has a real creative identity”, he underlines, specifying that London and New York Fashion Weeks “have a more commercial connotation.
But the excitement around his arrival is linked to his celebrity status followed by 30 million subscribers on Instagram. “There is a press, not necessarily specialized, which mentions Fashion Week because Victoria Beckham is part of it,” said Benjamin Simmenauer.
This Fashion Week will, however, be marked by the absence of the Celine brand: its artistic director Hedi Slimane paraded in June at Men’s Fashion Week in Paris after having abandoned the calendar for more than two years and presented his collections in films shot especially in castles.
“A non-event”, for Pascal Morand who wants to minimize this turnaround. “There may be other brand or art director choices at some point. There is this freedom,” he concludes.
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