Fashion becomes fun when it’s an exchange. Not unlike the back and forth of a heated tennis match. This idea occurs when “talking shop” with Charles Sebline, the half-French, half-English fashion designer.
Fashion becomes fun when it’s an exchange. Not unlike the back and forth of a heated tennis match. This idea occurs when “talking shop” with Charles Sebline, the half-French, half-English fashion designer. We first met in 1996. I was dog tired and he was “phenomenally eager” (his words, not mine) to show his sketches. A disastrous combination: furthered by the café’s poor lighting and my steaming irritation versus Charles’s nineteenth century hero-like appearance – burning eyes, expressive brow and billowing white shirt. Since then, he’s become a pal. Just as Charles has a refreshing sense of the ridiculous, he can turn serious and grave-faced. Discussing ex-employers, he suddenly announces, “Tom Ford is decent and that’s important.” Difficult to follow that! But the same could be said for Charles.
We’re going through his latest collection for Hamilton-Paris – the line he co-partners with Sophie Hamilton. Many of the blouses and dresses concentrate on Charles’s flou technique – French for soft draping – which he mastered after six years chez Yves Saint Laurent including two seasons in the late designer’s studio. Much appeals from the colours – tangerine and wine – to the frequent use of crêpe de chine and hand-drawn take on David Hicks’s ‘clinch’ pattern, morphing the iconic print into a subtle camouflage. Still, it’s his ‘wrap cuff’ that grabs me by the throat. Deceptively floppy, it consists of a three-point attack being neatly pleated around the wrist, clasped by a cuff-like flap and embellished by a pert little button that literally winks. I immediately think of Parisian women and all that wrist movement that continues – the teasing of hair, applying of lipstick and lighting of cigarettes. They have the playful wrist down to an art. Imagine how they could work the Hamilton-Paris ‘wrap cuff'.
Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni is a Paris-based British journalist who covers fashion and lifestyle as well as being the author of Sam Spiegel - The Biography of A Hollywood Legend, Understanding Chic, an essay from the Paris Was Ours anthology and soon-to-be released Chanel book, for Assouline's fashion series.
Robert Beck is former New Yorker currently based in Paris. Also known as C.J. Rabbitt, he is the author and illustrator of several children's books, including The Tale of Rabbitt in Paradis, Un Lapin à Paris and the soon-to-be-published A Bunny in the Ballet.
