SS27 - A Glimpse

With A Glimpse, Steven Passaro turns from the sky back to the room. Where the previous chapter dissolved the body upward, into something larger than the self, this collection brings it back down, into a single skin that lets itself be seen, but only in part.

Two forces inhabit every silhouette: the will to be looked at, and the instinct to stay hidden. They are not resolved. They are worn together, the way a body carries what coexists within it without settling.

. A shoulder that braces, a step that hesitates: Steven Passaro begins each silhouette there, and builds the rest by hand. The clothes do not impose a figure. They give form to what is already present, and not yet said. They show a part, and keep the rest.

"I wanted the work to be felt before it is seen. A garment can be entirely couture and look like almost nothing, because the hours are inside, where only the person wearing it knows. To me that restraint is the highest form of craft: to give everything, and reveal only a little."

Tailoring closes around the body, shoulders drawn, the line held tight, long coats sealing the figure. A sculpted hood frames the face and guards the eyes, protection worn openly. This is the armour of someone who has chosen to be seen, and is not ready to be seen entirely.

Then come the pieces that hide their making altogether. A suit that reads as plain is built like couture beneath the surface, hand-canvassed, shaped, constructed with the same hours given to an embroidered gown, and none of it visible from the outside. The craft is sealed inside the cloth, disclosed to no one but the body it holds. This is the collection's restraint at its furthest reach: everything made, nothing shown. What looks simple has been earned in silence.

This silence rests on something the house will not negotiate: time. Craft does not answer to the speed of the industry, to its noise, to its need to be seen quickly. A piece takes the hours it takes, and those hours cannot be compressed. It is the house's most precious material, the only one that can be neither hurried nor faked. The time held inside a garment is exactly what no shortcut can imitate.

And then the body moves. Godets open, only so far. Pleats, folded in like the memory of a form, release a single fold and no more. What looked sealed begins to breathe, an interior offered in fragments, in motion, to those near enough to catch it. 

The hand stays central throughout. Crystal is set bead by bead only where the garment parts, at the rim of a hood, the flare of a hem, marking the points where the interior risks showing, and never crossing the whole. Dormant fabrics, recovered from the reserves of the great houses, are unpicked and rebuilt: cloth that has already lived one life, kept from sight, now brought out to be seen, in part. Nothing here is printed onto the surface. It is built into it, hour by hour, so that what is revealed has first been worked for.

 With A Glimpse, Steven Passaro makes the case for couture as an intimate act: the will to be seen, the fear of being seen, and the patient, hidden labour that decides how much.

Creative Direction: Steven Passaro @stevenpassaro
Stylist and Image Consultant: Pauline Grosjean @paulinegrsjn
Photography: Sebastien Giraud @sebastiengiraud_
Assistant: Paolo
Video: Baleine sous cachalot Anthony Goujjane  @anthonygouj_, Yann Cathelinaud
Casting: Manon Sassy @manonsassycasting
Models : Kate, Yacine, Abdoul
Make-up Artist:  Nafik Bouchareb @nafikbouchareb
Hair Stylist:  Anastasiia Tymoshchuk @tymotynasty
Fine Jewelry : Marie Mas @marie_mas_jewelry

Music Composer: Edith Progue
Set designer : Kim Franjou -Luu @kimfranjouluu
Flower designer: Laetitia Chaussée  FANFAN @fanfan.fleurs
Home decoration: L’Objet @lobjet