Ludovic de Saint Sernin is excited. Her first collaboration with Zara will go on sale on November 17, a unique collection, just in time for the holiday season, that reinterprets her style for a global audience. And the French designer, a terrible child of recent fashion, champion of a sophisticated and transgressive style that claims from queer the sexy and mischievous elegance of the late nineties and early two thousand, is about to see one of her adolescent fantasies come true. “For me it was a dream, because I grew up admiring fashion collaborations like this, which on this scale are very rare and very exciting,” he observes in a video conference exclusively for ICON. “When a young designer manages to collaborate with such a big brand it is a great opportunity, because it gives us visibility and the possibility of working with a brand that has much more experience than us. Zara has just turned 50. And I remember my adolescence. When I was in high school, Zara was already the most Cold of the world. I remember my friends were crazy about Zara. Also at that time it was cheaper in Spain, so we dreamed of coming to Spain and buying millions of clothes. It was a real thrill. And I also feel a certain nostalgia, because fifteen-year-old Ludovic would be surprised if they told him that one day he will make a collection at Zara.”
From this dialogue between generations and eras the collection was born, “a perfect wardrobe to wear today, but with echoes of the past in style, textures and materials”, he states. “The idea was to create a collection that was the perfect combination between my brand and Zara, to create our own little world.”
The French designer arrived in Parisian fashion in 2017, with a proposal on the border between genres. She began creating men’s collections that integrated luxurious feminine codes – corsetry, heels, transparencies, crystals – but also walked the women’s catwalks. Today it has lines for men and women, and the same thing happens in this collaboration with Zara. “The idea is to propose a fairly fluid silhouette, because it is aimed at a broad audience, and there is a need for categories that customers can clearly identify. But in the end the garments can be combined and mixed, and there will be women who will buy from the men’s selection, and vice versa.”
There are shared codes between the two collections: same materials, matching models, fabrics and even models with slight adaptations. “Both collections reflect each other,” says the designer, who says he learned a lot during his collaboration with Zara’s design teams. “It was very interesting to learn with them how to make everything fit together perfectly,” he says. “As much as I want the clothes to be very flowy, that’s not always possible. So the goal was to achieve a similar feel in men’s and women’s clothes, while ensuring they fit well on all bodies.”
De Saint Sernin says he locked himself in his house last summer to design the collection. “It all started from the pins,” he says. “I had never worked with studs, and they give identity to the entire collection”. In the collaboration with Zara, the metal eyelets, a corsetry element that De Saint Sernin has made a distinctive sign, are absent, but their place is taken by metal studs that establish the necessary distance from the main line. “Many will expect me to put millions of eyelets in the collection, but I preferred to use studs to give it a unique and special look, because I don’t use them in my brand’s collections.”
These garments contain leather, fur, silk or wire mesh. Also waxed jeans, which look similar to leather. Materials that are part of the language of his brand, and which here range from luxury to accessible fashion thanks to a careful selection of suppliers and finishes, without forgetting the usual color palette: white, black, red and brown. “I have the luxury of running my own brand, but my resources are limited and Zara’s are much bigger. So it’s been great to work with so many options of materials and finishes. We did a lot of testing in Paris, A Coruña and New York. It’s been a year in the making.”
The collection for Zara arrives in time for the party season, as evidenced by its shiny details and night-time fabrics. But there is also tailoring, everyday accessories and even a cosmetics collection. Him fashion film The presentation of the collection, directed by Gordon von Steiner, brings the designer’s universe to New York, a city whose culture and icons he already honored last year, in a collection dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe. For his collection with Zara, he imagines a night out with models like Amelia Gray and Alex Consani, in sophisticated clubs and apartments where Roy Halston would have felt at home. Ludovic de Saint Sernin is French, but his imagination is perfectly suited to the city that never sleeps. “You know, an astrologer recently told me that I should move to New York. And the truth is that I like it very much, because I go there often and I have many friends and collaborators there.”
The collection goes on sale on November 17 and coincides with a particularly significant moment for New York, which faces a new phase under the next mayor of Zohran Mamdani, in one that promises to transform the city into an oasis of freedom and diversity in a country that seems to be moving in the opposite direction. “It seems natural to celebrate this moment, because New York is a global city and Zara is a global brand. There are many people in the countryside who are part of my community, and ultimately New York is the city of my idol, Robert Mapplethorpe.”
With this set of references, it is inevitable that Zara and Ludovic de Saint Sernin’s collection is also a tribute to nightlife as a natural ecosystem of fashion. The Frenchman’s clothes are designed for going out to party, to have fun, to add a touch of theatricality to the night. “When you go to New York, you always have to pack some clothes to go out to party, because it’s a very spontaneous city, where you walk down the street and suddenly you meet someone who invites you to go somewhere fabulous,” she explains. “That inspiration is very present. It’s a global collection for a global platform and I wanted to show that you can wear Ludovic de Saint Sernin in any circumstance, on a daily basis and on special occasions. With this collection you don’t need anything else.”
