Out with the jeans — Lutz Huelle was getting tired of them. The designer has been traveling a lot lately — he was recently named top designer at Delpozo and plans to keep his Paris base — which sparked an interest in sprucing things up. Properly.
“When you get cold in the airport, you sit around for hours, your pants get frumpy. So I was thinking ‘What could I do to make clothes for traveling that are kind of super-glamorous extreme but also super-easy?’”
The answer came down the runway, the glamour channeled through shimmery jacquards and bright taffetas, prominent diamond waterfall necklaces — the graphic kind, from the Eighties — as well as his trademark couture volumes including sleeves with an extra puff.
Thinking about comfort, and those long waits in public places, he provided pockets, hoods and capes — his latest reconstruction of the bomber jacket morphed into handsome, blanketlike capes that were very sleek. Shifting the volumes from the sleeves to the back — built from gathering around the neck — this season’s couture jacket was a bright fuchsia collarless number, and, in his words “more extreme.”
On the soundtrack, the Vivaldi violins kept getting chased off by the commanding voices of Beth Ditto and Courtney Love. Huelle has been laying the ground work for a deeper invasion of bourgeois territory; hopefully he can prolong the stay.
His plans are to carry on with his namesake label even as he takes up the new mission at Delpozo. “It’s amazing, these are exciting times,” he said enthused.