Kenzo Spring 2012 Collection

Note to heritage labels looking to breathe new life into a brand: Hire a couple curators of cool, and hope they come with a merry band of friends. But don’t move too fast. The only two people who fit that particular description are off the market for now.

Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, the retail mavericks behind Opening Ceremony, took over as creative directors of Kenzo in July with the intent to restore the label to its original vibrancy. The presentation they put on Sunday was a great way to start. Not only was the setting extraordinarily charming—when you walked into the courtyard of their offices on rue Vivienne (coincidentally down the street from Takada’s first store) you saw models in all the windows waving hello and giant block K, E, N, Z, and O letters lying about—but the clothes were, too. It would have been very easy for Lim and Leon to dig deep into the Kenzo archives, repurpose a print, update a shape, and call it good—or, conversely, get mired in the history and turn out something heavily retro. But instead, the duo took the spirit of the house—color, print, and proportion—and made it their own by designing delightful new patterns (birds and fishnet) and creating pieces that were sporty and modern, but also retained a little of that 1970s Parisian chic. You could immediately imagine girls here or in New York pulling apart looks and wearing the blue fishnet-print flak jacket (or any of the two-toned utility jackets for that matter) with jeans or over a summer dress. A similarly patterned orange-and-green skirt was super simple but also super stylish. The wide-leg pants—like, really wide leg—at first looked a little silly, but relative to the scale of the building, the stage, and Leon’s thoughts on proportion, they made sense.

As for that merry band of friends, well, Chloë Sevigny modeled the last look, a blue button-up jumpsuit, Jason Schwartzman did the music (a recording of the Talking Heads’ “Wild Wild Life” that segued into Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” with Schwartzman on drums and other musicians playing along during the presentation), and Spike Jonze filmed it all. What was especially endearing was how invested in it all of them appeared to be. Schwartzman looked really connected to those drums, and Jonze quizzed Solange Knowles’s son Jules to make sure he was having fun. “Was it less boring than a normal fashion show,” Jonze asked Jules. “It was? That’s good.”

Via VOGUE