Trends come and go, but there is a certain essence that flows constantly through time in women's fashion, beneath all the posturing. It has been around forever, ever since women began wearing skirts. And though it can become blurred sometimes, tangled in designers' attempts to reinvent the wheel, femininity is at the crux of it. It is all about encapsulating beauty in the sheen of a fabric, a captivating silhouette or the resonance of a colour. It is also about the women who have defined what it means to be beautiful, creating the blueprint for our definition of style.
Paris-based Hanane Hotait's spring/summer collection oozes sex appeal, but in the most unassuming way. "I love the Riviera in the '60s. I can just picture those women walking about with their sunglasses; they are totally timeless and refined, yet also carefree. They were the inspiration of my summer collection," muses the designer. "You'll find something of Brigitte Bardot in her heyday in Saint-Tropez, but it could also be Penelope Cruz walking around some Spanish town today."
There is certainly an element of cinematic drama in her ruffled silk taffeta blouses and exuberantly printed silk dress coats. But it is tempered by an airy nonchalance, a kind of insouciance that makes them perfectly adaptable to the day or night. "We always try to have pockets, because women nowadays nearly always have their phone with them," she points out. It is a detail that seemingly takes the guilt out of the fussiness, a perfectly measured dose of modern sensibility.
In fact, the playful, vibrant hues and vintage references are a riff of what actually began as a simple — and interestingly, masculine — concept. "We started this adventure with the Mia shirt, which is actually inspired by my dad's shirts. There's an undeniable elegance to women wearing white shirts, and when you add a belt, you get this beautiful volume," explains Hotait, who was born and raised in Paris of Lebanese parents. On the surface, her collection, with its black-and-white gingham midi skirts and playfully dramatic dresses, is what you might call girly, but it also has this intangible tension between feminine and masculine. "I name the styles after friends or famous women, and sometimes men — as women also have a masculine side."
Launched three years ago, Hotait's namesake brand is aligned with the likes of Ellery, Rosie Assoulin and Carven in terms of market positioning and price, a topic she is keen to elaborate on. "I'm not as well known as Jacquemus, for example, but if you look at the details, the fabrics and the production — everything is from Europe and it's all made in Paris," she explains. Such a high level of quality is increasingly rare in this age of fast fashion and synthetic fabrics, even among luxury brands, and there is no doubt that the strategy is working for Hotait so far. Her collection is already spanning continents and can be found in places as far-flung as Corsica, Dagestan, Dubai, Doha, Beijing and Monaco — and online too, of course — which proves that beauty and quality are two things that are never going to go out of style.
