Julie Kegels must be thanking whomever let go of their copy of Judith Price’s 1980 book Executive Style: Achieving Success Through Good Taste and Design, which isn’t so much dedicated to dressing for success as it is to decorating for success. Kegels, a 26-year-old designer from Antwerp, discovered a vintage copy of it at a Los Angeles flea market, and its premise intrigued her, with its fetishization of modern design and the orchestration of work spaces as a way to climb the corporate ladder. (And just as intriguing for Kegels: the subtext about how women navigated all of this.)
In the end, Executive Success inspired her third collection, a witty, inventive and thoughtful treatise on late 20th century design classics, corporate branding, a nod to kitsch, and a wink to what can only be described as male drag. Also of note: She was the second designer in one day to riff on the world of work, with Kegels’s presentation happening directly before Stella McCartney’s own exploration of Stellacorp. Clearly there is something in the air—or at the very least, something in the office, which is, once more, an inescapable part of everyday life for so many of us.
Kegels held her presentation on stage at a theater in the 17th arrondissement, with a model coming on and getting dressed in the opening look, a tech bro Fair Isle-style monogrammed sweater, undone blue shirt, and outsized navy pants. The clothes had been arranged on a caramel leather lounge chair which had a nagging familiarity to it: Was it Marcel Breuer? Mies Van Der Rohe? Actually, neither of them: Kegels designed it herself with the young Belgian furniture label HARMO. The kicker here, though, was that at the close of the presentation, a model came out and zipped herself in a trompe l’oeil jumpsuit version of that opening look. The idea: We don more than just our clothes when we put them on.
Between these two points: rather chic knit polo shirt dressing; blazers cut with a loose insouciant swing to them; furniture and wood grain photoprints blown up onto narrow skirts; and other skirts deconstructed to reveal their ’50s petticoat linings. The scissoring off of belted waistbands and tacking them onto the shirts they were worn with looked cool. Kegels also has a sure eye with accessories: leather seat cushions turned into enormous clutches, deconstructed Converse sneakers morphed into high heels, and this season’s version of bags draped in mini dust covers—something that’s become a trademark of hers—printed with the legend, Girl arriving at work with wet socks. I mean, haven’t we all been there?
The takeaway here was that Kegels, with her deep exploration of her theme, her establishing of what she wants her label to be about, and her stretching the limits of what she might be capable of making (towards the end, a model came out in an evening dress made out of wood veneer) is creating her own definition of success. In a Paris week of big changing of the guard debuts and megabrand shows, it’s a thrill to discover a new talent who’s intent on doing things her way.
