Au Revoir, Olivier Theyskens

Olivier Theyskens, the artistic director of French fashion house Nina Ricci, officially debuted his last collection for the brand last month during Fall/Winter 2009 Paris fashion week. The 32 year old designer, born in Brussels, Belgium, was positioned as Nina Ricci's artistic director on November first of 2006, and debuted his first line in March of 2007 during the fall season. I was quite shocked that his contract with the house will not be resigned, I really loved Theyskens' work. He's a young designer but a criticlly acclaimed design prodigy to say the least. Anna Wintour personally gave him the CFDA's International Award in 2002 when he headed design at Rochas at just 25.He has done too much for for the house while still maintaining the aesthetic of Nina Ricci. Sort of like Nicholas does at Balenciaga. Peter Coppings, a senior designer at Louis Vuitton, will take Theyskens' place when his contract expires this October.

Here's a review of Olivier Theyskens' Ready-to-Wear Collections ever since his rein at Nina Ricci:

FALL/WINTER 2007 RTW

"Olivier Theyskens said he wanted "to introduce a new wave of cool—something urban and gray-ish, but nonchalant, fragile, and superlight" at Nina Ricci. Since he's only just exited the now-defunct Rochas, the collection he showed, though suffused with his signature poetics, felt more transitional than definitive. Like several other designers of his age, Theyskens is accurately intuiting the fact that fashion needs to address a younger, more casual level of dressing, but at the same time, pressure is on him to stay within the fuzzy parameters of the not-so-defined genre of Ricci femininity."

SPRING/SUMMER 2008 RTW

"It was a group of girls you'd see on the street in the early morning coming from a ball," explained Olivier Theyskens. His wispy raggle-taggle troupe was wending its way home in a particularly poetic state of dishevelment, of course. Their clothes were ombré-tinted in subtle grays and browns, as if smudged by the murky first light of a city day. The opening girl had pulled on her boyfriend's dusty tux, which had come apart at the back, over an artfully wilted twisted satin tunic. Others had draped sloppy, holey cardigans over the shredded remains of charmeuse and chiffon, trailing stringy feather boas as they walked. Some, possibly, were even down to their shirts or slips (you know how you start losing things on a long night out?), and one had wrapped a blanket—or maybe the dance-hall"

FALL/WINTER 2008 RTW

"Under Olivier Theyskens' guidance, Nina Ricci is going through a metamorphosis. The label was originally a frilly lady brand, but he is steering it toward a young, hip girl with an unshowy rockster personality. To get there, Theyskens took her hand today and led her through a long trail in the woods, dressing her in clothes tinted and textured with the vegetal yellowy-greeny-brownish colors of fallen leaves or hibernating moths. "Strange and poetic," he called it, "but not dark."

SPRING/SUMMER 2009 RTW

"Olivier Theyskens' collection for Nina Ricci was like watching the performance of a long piece of self-referential romantic poetry. It's a world of his own, and to fully appreciate it, you need to know what's gone before in his work: his love of Edwardiana and tailcoats; the fluttery, flyaway cutting; the delicate prints and the dusty, organic woodland-floor palettes he likes."

FALL/WINTER 2009 RTW

"The show might have been his swan song at Nina Ricci but Olivier Theyskens saw it through with a fierce, surreal poetry no one who witnessed it will forget. Vastly tall, his strong-shouldered women were walking, trancelike, on what looked like an impossibility: a laced-up platform ankle boot with a sickle-shaped hole at the back. No heels at all. Their clothes—everything from strangely flowing pants to incredibly cut suits to probably the best black leather jacket in Paris and evening dresses with swooping, furling skirts—were a tour de force. Between the strange atmosphere, the supersharp, almost Mugler-esque jackets, and the sculpted forms, it rounded up everything fashion-watchers have known Theyskens is capable of, and went even further."

OLIVIER THEYSKENS

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