NOTES 21/08/2026

Latest season, lasting seasons

The greatest achievement of contemporary fashion may well be that every brand has become convinced of the importance of having its own voice. The results are remarkably similar. Every story is carefully told, every collection has a purpose and every garment promises longevity. Sustainability has become a simulacrum. One almost begins to miss vanity. 

It wasn't always like this. Or perhaps it was. Fashion has always been exceptionally gifted at changing its vocabulary while keeping many of its habits intact. Words arrive and words leave. Garments usually stay a bit longer. Yet it’s through words that our values take shape and translate into an attitude towards clothes and the seasons to which they belong. 

For reasons I still do not entirely understand, I have always preferred garments over fashion. The distinction sounds artificial until one spends enough time around both. They differently approach time. Fashion likes announcements. Garments are generally more discreet. Fashions come and go in terms of the “latest” seasons. Garments tend to build up a “lasting” relationship with our bodies.

I used to buy clothes simply because I enjoyed them and without a deeper ambition. Occasionally I found something that made the walk home unexpectedly pleasant. I thought that was the whole story but then art history interfered. That is probably the most accurate word. It did not make me more intellectually refined - it made looking more intriguing, more attentive and imaginative.  A drapery in a fifteenth-century painting suddenly refused to remain a drapery. It insisted on becoming weight, movement and memory. It was an argument and not just an ornament. It became impossible to glance so one had to stay a bit longer, perusing it, touching it, relating to it in time.

Oddly enough, for Janue clothing has always been a similar tactile reflection on time, attention, imagination. The longer I looked, the less obvious it became. A beautiful garment was no longer necessarily an interesting one. Sometimes the interesting garment was almost disappointingly predictable. It revealed itself reluctantly like certain books or people. And who likes predictability except people in long relationships?

This has made shopping considerably more efficient. Every now and then I still come across an exceptional cotton sweater made by a cheap mass retailer, usually in the men's department in an absurdly large size. It reminds me that quality is not always loyal to price and that care occasionally appears in unexpected places. That is why ideology has always struck me as a poor shopping companion. Beauty and meaning emerge from the context in which the wearer’s imagination is placed.

People now ask why we closed our first Janue shop. The answer they seem to expect is usually strategic and it rarely disappoints them. Wholesale, growth, international expansion. All perfectly reasonable and perfectly true but none of them entirely satisfying. The real answer is less spectacular.

At some point I realised I was becoming more interested in making clothes than in selling them. Those are not the same activity. There is a tension between selling and making that every couturier knows quite well. We want to shape our client’s imagination and sense of time and every step in that direction is a challenge, an invitation, both an opportunity and a risk. Just like a modern artist never makes art for an existing public, aways pushing sensibility in a different direction, Janue has similarly envisaged a way of reinventing our clients’ sensible relationship to the clothes they collect. The “latest” seasons is less important than the “lasting” relation to the sartorial landscape we create. Or, in the words of David Bowie: Time … memory made manifest. Janue has always lived on this desire to stitch a body full of memories.

This might seem as a strangely authoritative expression. Nobody seems inclined to argue with it. A garment can spend six months convincing us of its importance and one day acquiring two surprisingly modest words: a lasting season. Nothing about the cloth has changed. Nothing about the construction, nothing about the pleasure of wearing it. Only the sentence surrounding it has altered. Language, it turns out, ages much faster than clothing. Perhaps this tension between language and garments is what we mistake for fashion. 

Céline