Marine Serre Is Still Moonstruck: the French designer presented her SS25 collection at Pitti Uomo in Florence

Marine Serre, the guest designer at the men’s fashion trade fair Pitti Uomo this season, showed for the first time outside of Paris. A powerful selection of menswear pieces, upcycled haute couture techniques, her signature “crescent moon” pattern on Made in Italy leather pieces, and a head-turning collaboration with Repetto. 

The show, titled “Sempre Legati” (“Always Connected”) was originally announced as Serre’s menswear début. But in the end, she got so inspired by the show’s location that she decided to add couture and women’s ready-to-wear to the final line-up.

The show took place in the gardens of Villa di Maiano, a beautiful mansion in the hilly outskirts of Florence (scenes from the movie “Room With A View” were filmed there), just before sunset. An Italian experimental quartet provided the edgy live soundtrack.

The men’s looks were mostly tailored, with strong, masculine suits, a nod to Italian eleganza. There was a lot of leather — made in Italy — both for men and women, in black, brown, red or purple, with Marine Serre’s crescent moon logo airbrushed all over trousers, jackets and bags. Her signature pattern was also seen on sandals and denim ballerina flats, crafted in collaboration with the ballet shoes specialist from France Repetto.  

Several upcycled looks were made from off-white tote bags, mostly with German and Dutch logos, and tennis bags — the latter a reference to Serre’s own history as a teenage tennis prodigy. A finale of pure white looks, some made from upcycled embroidered bedsheets, were meant, said Serre during a press preview the morning of the show, to evoke a message of hope.

Serre made a “Radical Call For Love” — the slogan appeared on a recycled t-shirt dress in the last look of the collection, and it referenced Serre’s graduate collection at La Cambre in Brussels, back in 2016, not long after the wave of terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels.

“I think it’s really important to keep that hope,” she said, “even if it feels like nothing is changing.

Nothing is political as everything is political. For this show, more particularly, I decided to spread a message of peace. Life is part of what inspires artists, if not the main inspiration. Today I cannot create without sadness looking at the world around me. The collection symbolises a call for peace and connection.”

Serre has always shown some menswear along with her womenswear collections, but earlier this year decided to do a separate men’s line. The début collection, for the coming autumn and winter, was unveiled in Paris in January, with a lookbook.

“I had been thinking about separating the collections for a while, but I wanted to wait for the right moment,” she said at the time. “Once decided, it took some time. I think I’m mostly seen as a women’s designer, but I’ve always been enormously interested in dressing men. And I could see that there were plenty of men who were interested in wearing the brand, but they might not have had enough choice. For me, doing menswear is mostly an emotional and esthetical decision. It’s not necessarily where the money is. I just really wanted to do it.”

Courtesy: Marine Serre
Text: Jesse Brouns