De Pino: Gabriel Figueiredo's Clothing-Memory
COLLECTION Gabriel Figueiredo / PHOTOGRAPHY Bertrand Jeannot / FASHION Charline Felder
HAIR Olivier Noraz / MAKE-UP Jade Guigue / CASTING DIRECTOR Remj Casting
MODEL(S) Romerlyne - Grace - Nelly - Zoé - Martin - Rémi
For his most recent collection, “De Pino,” Gabriel Figueiredo channels his inner-child, quite literally. Each garment—inspired by craft, leisurely play, and childhood memories like trying on his mother’s dresses as a young boy—possesses a completeness: Bertrand returns to earlier memories, using them like raw material for his garments—re-shaping them into something new.
My memory plays a very important role. These are memories that I put into shape most of the time. The first sensations related to the garment I had as a child. As memory distorts memories by retaining certain details more than others, by reshaping events according to our sensibilities, the memory becomes in the end already a creation and I simply put it in shape.
I always put the idea of the collector quite literally and squarely in the concept of "collection" At the beginning I have images in my head, clothes that call out to me and that obsess me. I want to quote them, to gather them to constitute my ideal fashion collection, like a small museum. It is often elements that come from the history of fashion, costume, designers I admire, Cristobal Balenciaga, Madeleine Vionnet, Martin Margiela, John Galliano, or simple clothes that I find in yard sales. Things that come from my childhood, the celebrities who fascinated me, my mother, my aunts, the women who surrounded me.
Personally, the next steps are to have fun with this collection that I have built up. What would my inner-child do with all these clothes? It's a bit like when I played with my mother's clothes and ended up with a sexy but oversized dress over my childhood PJs. It's this energy that I want to put in De Pino: The dream of femininity or celebrity that's confronted with reality and the waking life of a small boy.
