Paris Fashion Week: SPACE Brand Paskal Does Ukranian Florals with No Florals

Can a designer create a floral-themed collection with no florals in it whatsoever? And can that collection be relevant in fall—a time when flowers are dying and shrinking into their roots, not busting out all over? If you’re Ukrainian designer Julie Paskal, you can pull all of that off and more.

Just two days before her official Paris Fashion Week runway debut, I chatted with the young fashion upstart about a highly conceptual collection that extends her thematic and real-world relationship with every day life in Eastern European villages.

Overall, in the general sense of her brand, Julie has been thinking about Ukrainian villages. Recent collections explore various elements of these villages, but for Fall 2016, she was thinking in particular about floral shops.

While these thoughts could yield bloom-filled prints and other literal interpretations, Julie took a far more conceptual route, thinking instead about the life cycle and commercial application of nature.

Stay with me here …

This first part of the collection—sweet, interesting iterations of the on-trend white cotton shirt along with chic, short black trousers—is about the contrast of life as well as the uniforms that floral shop vendors wear on a daily basis. Her look book—starring a 16-year old Urkainian model recently anointed by the Vetements/Balenciaga world—shows styled the collection pieces styled to make up a sort of right-now approximation of this traditional role.

And there on the racks at the showroom is the next phase of the concept: a plaid pinafore relating to the vendors’ uniform, and a polka-dotted series that represent the cellophane that Julie says is used to package the flowers in the market so they can go home with the villagers.

It feels like an important part of the collection in Julie’s mind. She’s intent on communicating the life cycle, and that polka-dot patterned wrap is where the flowers undergo a change—from nature to commodity.

Where the collection turns to black three-dimensional technical crepe dresses is where the flowers have passed over to product. Their organic shape is still in tact, but they have morphed into something else.

They are, in a word, denatured. But wouldn’t they—or rather the dress that represents them—look good at a dinner party or birthday bash?

Julie told me that this week represents a pretty huge hurdle in her life. Earlier, before the recent weekend, her current collection was featured in the windows of the iconic Paris shop Colette; with her PFW runway debut on Wednesday, she’ll be realizing two very big dreams.

She should check off masterminding an abstract, philosophical but closet-ready collection, too. A floral theme without a single flower—it’s quite a accomplishment, too.

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—Laura Cassidy

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