Paris Fashion Week is a rat race like never before. A packed show schedule is throwing the journalist horde into an identity crisis. Should they go left, right, or straight ahead? Press agents regularly stand waiting with courtesy buses, holding handwritten signs, side by side, trying to lure journalists away from their career-defining dinners, the other designer, or simply their warm bed.

Many decided not to go to Quai d'Austerlitz that evening of March 7th, to a remote and unknown location where Jurgi Persoons presentation would take place. Cold, far, damp, hungry. Who was Jurgi Persoons again? Stupid, stupid, stupid of those who didn't go.

It is the most beautiful presentation of the season.This is what you do it for. To see a designer who built such a strong identity surpass himself in one fell swoop. To see him slip into his groove.

At the filming location of the realistic AIDS drama and the 1980s cult film "Les nuits fauves," the gay prostitutes stayed away for the evening. "I wanted a quay on the Seine, I wanted the desolation of a parking garage, and I wanted cars to be able to drive there for a long time," says Persoons. "This location had everything; I really tripped when I found it." He regrets that the normal nighttime traffic keeps its distance. For a few hours, he placed a long row of glass display cases against the nighttime skyline of a remote industrial estate. Women stand-head to toe in Jurgi Persoons's style-silently and staring straight ahead in their glass elevator booths.

Icons of authenticity. Untouchable? For themselves or for the viewer? Fragile? The line between purity and evoking aggression can be thin. The transparent glass frame isolates them from the cranes, the passing ships, and the typical Parisian yellow-green light. Cars glide by in silence. In slow voyeurism, evoking the alienating effect of double isolation. Many people-lit cigarettes as positioning points in the darkness-get out, in an attempt to get closer to inviolability, to embrace the mystique. The clothes are so perfect. Torn, psychotic, sexy, intimate, and distant. Beneath her glass dome, each woman has her own capricious character, reflected in the garment's psychological map; fragile lace versus hard wool and frayed mohair. Patched and held together by a fierce red thread. "It's about trauma and therapy," says Persoons. "About the obsession of wanting to possess something or someone, something very beautiful that ultimately, out of powerlessness, must be destroyed at all costs.

By yourself or by others. It is also about the dogged desire to repair it afterwards." Hence that angry red thread. In the words of Speaking to the person, it's a "psychologically obsessed" collection. Truly clothes that get under your skin.


Text by Angelique Westerhof