CARMEN MARCH

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In the midst of fashion’s breakneck pace, Spanish designer Carmen March is quietly slowing things down. Her eponymous label was first launched in 2004, but is now stronger than ever, after the designer decided to take that rare leap in fashion: a break. “If you’re able to stop and you can stop, then I think you should,” she explains. “People will tell you that you shouldn’t and that you will lose rhythm, but it’s not true.” Actually, this time for reflection has been invaluable for March, offering a fresh perspective and newfound sense of balance. The effects are palpable in her softened corsetry and impeccable tailoring, presented in Paris for Fall 2017.

“When you do made-to-measure, you spend a lot of time in an atelier and you learn how to construct a garment,” March explains of her early fashion experience and the origins of her label as a couture brand. Now with a ready-to-wear focus, her attention to detail is no less significant. “La cage is very important,” she says of the French term for corsetry. “It’s not meant to be something that’s uncomfortable, but actually very subtle and soft. It keeps everything in place, but also allows you to breathe, to eat, and to live.”

Garment structure is something the designer has clearly studied a great deal, which is part of the reason why it can be seen this season, as a means to showcase the brand’s commitment to designing womenswear with integrity. “You need to make it contemporary and the way to do that is to make it light and deconstruct it,” the designer says of traditional styles like the corset and tuxedo, both of which have been reworked for this collection.

Integrity of silhouette isn’t the only thing March is concerned about. In fact, the designer says she fails to understand why so many other houses focus solely on looks because, for her, fabric is equally important. It’s something that belies not only her couture background, but also her roots growing up in Spain, where the label is still based. “I was born on the island of Mallorca actually, where my mother’s family used to make traditional fabrics,” she says. “They specialized in ikat fabrics that have been used there for centuries.”

Today, March believes that increasingly few fashion houses have respect for this aspect of a garment. “Fabrics are becoming worse in quality and I find that very disappointing,” she admits. “A good fabric lasts longer, so it is super important to me in the collection—how it feels. Not just when you touch it either, but when you’ve been wearing it for a while. Yes, shape is important and fit is very important, but everyone worries about how things look today. What about how things feel or smell, or the way that they sound when you move in them? Those things are important too and it all comes down to fabrics.”

Fortunately for March, she is surrounded by a fantastic design team that shares her vision and with whom she has worked for many years. This, she says, is part of what made it so easy for her to return to the industry after a two-year hiatus and then some time spent at the helm of Spanish label Pedro del Hierro. “In those two years that I stopped—which was five or six years ago now—I witnessed everything get so much faster,” she recalls. “It was like someone had pushed the accelerator and everything started going downhill really quickly, with brands doing four or six collections a year. Now I feel like everybody is spinning a little bit too fast.”

While March concedes that some designers might be able to work that way, it certainly isn’t for her. Asking which was my favorite look from the Fall 2017 collection, my answer of the strikingly sculptural white dress is all the proof she needs. “The white dress was the last piece we designed,” she reveals. “I find that in each collection, the best pieces are usually the ones we design towards the end—often the last three pieces—because you’ve been working on an idea for so long and, in the end, you strip it back to its simplest form. To get there, you have to work intensely on that idea for three months. It takes time, you know, at least for me.”

March’s integrity as a designer extends all the way to her collection concepts as well. In the case of Fall 2017, this concept was derived from the black-and-white photography by Lucien Clergue and Diane Arbus she collects, especially the former’s imagery of a troupe of circus children in the Twenties. “There’s this little boy wearing a harlequin black-and-white suit and he has bruises on his hands. You can see that he’s been exercising,” she says. “Basically everything started with that picture. It’s where you get the triangular silhouettes and all the harlequin motifs in the collection.” For March, creating a black-and-white collection has always been the dream—and it’s one that she came very close to this season.


“They just look so good together,” she elaborates. “But then halfway through [designing the Fall collection], I panicked about not having color, so I decided we needed something that wouldn’t disrupt things, which was red. I find that it’s almost like a non-color, it’s so basic.” This color palette of black, white, and red certainly recalls the designer’s Spanish heritage—but then so does the fabrication used throughout the collection. If there is one thing that Carmen March leaves you with an appreciation for, it’s the importance of fabrics, something she believes our hands just ‘know.’ “The velvets have been disappearing from Europe,” she tells me sadly, “with all the fabric producers now moving to Asia.” But of course, March managed to seek out the very best for her designs. “This French fabric house has a beautiful hand-painted harlequin motif that they’ve been doing since the Twenties,” she says. “So I approached them to do it in black-and-white and it’s one of the most important fabrics in the collection.”