Yahoo Lifestyle Ashi Studio Couture Spring 2025: Lusting for the Bourgeois
Don’t be afraid to lay out ambitions — and assets — bare.
“I felt that I should tackle something I hadn’t done before, which is sensuality,” said Paris-based designer Ashi, who only goes by his last name.
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“Mistress of her own destiny” with aspirations to be a bourgeois is how he described the woman he imagined this spring. Each of the 20-odd sketches had classically French first names. These were a nod to notorious brothel keeper Madame Claude, whose sophisticated “girls” allegedly went on to become princesses, actresses or society wives.
But the woman in Ashi’s mind is no a saucy minx, she’s one of the hieratic characters from the works of polymath image-maker and perfumer Serge Lutens, whose work featured prominently on a board backstage.
She’s witty, too, if sequined decals of cigarettes placed on the leg like garters and dogs matching the looks — in reality sculpted accessories executed in feather — were anything to go by.
Ashi spun this fantasy of upward social mobility, balancing overt sensuality in the materials — velvet, barely there Chantilly lace, duchesse satin — with shapes forming cocoons that telegraphed a “look but don’t touch” impression.
Opening with corseted looks, their structure made all the more salient by whisper-thin lace, the show progressed to more covered sensuality, like a slinky velvet gown that espoused the body before arching up into a gravity-defying train.
By the end, that echoed the trappings of the well-to-do French home, turning its curio items such as Coromandel screens and marquetry furniture into intricately embroidered mother-of-pearl incrustations on corsets.
Launch Gallery: Ashi Studio Spring 2025 Couture
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