In Memory Of Love
THE ENTIRE
MEMORY OF YOU
The Graduate Collection of Pauline Dujancourt
Sometimes I feel that the appreciation of fashion design as an art form is almost non existent on fashion blogs. Blogging has become an endless stream of personal style featuring pedestrian looks pieced together from high street clothes you've seen on a million other bloggers. An endless parade of crowd pleasing dullness. The very thing that made blogging appealing - that anyone can have a blog - is actually the thing that's killing style creativity.
But I still love to research and discover new creative talents who inspire me, who make me want to play with fabrics, shapes and silhouettes. I'd rather find the work of a passionate fashion graduate, exploring the purest of ideas, than sit scrolling through Zara. Increasingly however I'm struggling to find such talents as there are so few resources out there dedicated to undiscovered or new designers.
However, I occasionally unearth a diamond. And today this diamond is called Pauline Dujancourt.
Pauline grew up in Paris and began her creative life by pursuing a fine arts degree at the Duperre Art School in Paris. However after an enlightening internship at Marios Schwab’s design studio in East London she decided to study fashion and ended up applying to the London College of Fashion. She is now furnished with both the Graduate Diploma and MA Womenswear from LCF.
With her breathtaking graduate collection, The Entire Memory Of You, the young designer explores the aftermath of failed relationships and past loves. What affects we carry with us after a love affair has ended, even many years later. During the course of her research for the collection she asked people to tell her what they would keep and what they would throw away from past relationships. Most people chose to keep physical things such as jumpers, t-shirts, letters, scarves. She used this as the basis for the collection so we see delicate, fragile tulle mixed with wool and words are embroidered onto pure white fabric.
She explores the themes of fragility, tension and pain and eventual clarity and healing through her diaphanous colour palette of ivory, white and blues. The lightness and airiness of the whites are interrupted by flashes of dark blue tulle, representing those moments where we might still be punctuated by sorrow from old wounds.
The collection perfectly visualises her inspiration, right down to the wool threads as how often have you said in the course of heartbreak that you're 'hanging by a thread'? I've only ever been truly heartbroken once, when my first love and I broke up, but those emotions stay there forever, inside your bones, and this collection sums up those feelings I still vividly recall even though it was nearly 30 years ago.
Collections like this keep me inspired to blog. No, they don't garner comments or interactions, but they keep me searching for beauty and creativity out there in the fashionsphere because ocassionaly I find it.
