Backstage, just before his show at the Palais de Tokyo, Atlein’s Antonin Tron was giving a rundown of what had been in his mind when designing his fall 2024 collection. It worked to dazzling effect and with his usual absolute rigor of economy a lean sinuous look punctuated by zippers snaking over the body, a fur that was actually made out of jersey, and more outerwear than he has ever shown before (and very good it was too). In front of Tron was a board of tightly edited images, a mere 12, which is really not very much at all; I’ve seen designers’ inspiration boards which look like they’ve got the entire contents of the Smithsonian and the Musee d’Orsay slapped up onto them. On Tron’s were pictures ranging from a distant galaxy to a spooky close up of eyes, the pupils just pinpoints of white light, black leather clad glamazons from the ’80s (don’t hold me to that—could have been the late ’70s) and the cover of feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s seminal 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto.
“I went back to my obsession, which is science fiction, and powerful women in science fiction,” Tron said. He indicated a screenshot of a dark gray humanoid figure: “This is from a film where an alien life form constantly modifies itself genetically to whatever’s around; I somehow linked that to my own love of using fabric and constantly manipulating and changing it And I’d been reading a lot of Haraway, with the idea of the figure of the cyborg, which resonates given all of the augmented bodies today. She wrote about how we are all augmented. But,” he said, laughing, “I don’t want to get too deep about it all.” In essence, this is Tron’s great strength as a designer: the constant oscillation between the mental and the corporeal; the intellectual and the visceral. He might love a high blown concept, but he is just as much in love with the actual act of cutting, draping and making—the sheer graft of fashion.
Tron’s fall was also a reminder that he is perhaps—OK, no perhaps about it: is—one of the most gifted manipulators of material working today. For fall he wanted, he said, to create a silhouette that was “tough and fluid.” You could see it in all the cropped bomber or MA1 flight jacket style pieces, in khaki or red, their unzipped hoods, lined in his faux fur, spread over the shoulders. They were often worn with tight hooded tops (the look gave a kind of throwback to Gaultier vibe: thumbs up to that) and ethereally light draped skirts, in a golden-green, say, or a deep bordeaux, often with those zips he loved slithering down each side. Tron also used a fabric Cristobal Balenciaga developed back in 1949 called cracknyl—a wool with a waterproof finish that looks like wet asphalt, which along with his matte scale-like sequins in forest green or deep cranberry gave a subtle nod to his sci-fi obsessions with their otherworldly (but still v. chic) appearance. And of course interspersed with all this creativity were some trademark Tron moments: Knockout dresses, twisted and turning around the body, the fabric manipulated to absolute technical virtuoso perfection.
