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ArdAzAei founder Bahareh Ardakani has been quietly doing ready-to-wear for several seasons now. This PFW, however, she made it more official, staging a presentation in her couture atelier on the Rue Saint-Florentin.
“It’s all about making versatile pieces that can be layered and styled in different ways, and that reflect the movement in couture,” Ardakani explained during a walkthrough. Echoing July’s couture outing, called The Folded Sea, a tightly edited knitwear lineup had intricately engineered gills, called fleurs-de-mer after sea anemones, that could be tugged this way and that to spiral around the body.
Innovative knitwear is Ardakani’s latest obsession—not surprising, given her math and engineering background—and she made a point of working with organic cashmere and virgin wool to produce sculpted shapes with geometric ribbing. (Nearly half of this collection was GOTS-certified, as is her atelier.) For this PFW debut she chose a quiet luxury palette of beige, ochre and black, with the occasional detour into blue jacquard for a tank and skirt set. That path—distinctive, chic, travel-friendly—seemed worth pursuing further.
As her clients well know, Ardakani cuts a mean trouser. Here, she offered a couple of examples, shown alongside coats and suiting of exacting and somewhat complicated geometry to mimic her pentaradial couture constructions. Evening wear included a short bustier dress in orange taffeta, the fabric crunched and swirled almost aquatically around the body. Statement coats, including one in vegetable-tanned leather and another in beige wool, were intricately cut and pieced together. Bevel-toed stilettos channeled the brand’s signatures. Now that Ardakani has her formal language set up, it will be interesting to see what happens when she relaxes into it a little more.
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