Inside the Red Room
That is precisely why it mattered that Nouchi said he approached Twin Peaks not as a reference, but as a feeling. A misty summer, a restless elegance and a tension hard to explain… The characters who appeared throughout the show were fragments of that world: the detective, the small-town waitress, the rebellious youth and the femme fatale. These were not costumes; they were archetypes drawn from modern life.
With the first look, the “broken suit” idea that Nouchi has long been developing began to reveal itself. Strong shoulders and wide lapels were preserved, but the suit was no longer a single, unified whole. A cream double-breasted jacket met dark denim overalls, pinstriped shirts traded places with wide-legged trousers, and classic tailoring set up an unexpected tension with boxer shorts and briefs. Seriousness and fragility, formality and intimacy began to live within the same silhouette.
As the collection unfolded, the characters too began to blur into one another. In one look, the same model evoked Dale Cooper’s calm discipline; in the next, a rebellious youth from a small-town motorcycle club; then a stranger sitting alone at midnight in an empty bar. This is exactly where Nouchi’s achievement lay: he did not narrate the characters; he let you sense them through just a few garments.
Denim was one of the season’s strongest building blocks. Dark indigo overalls, washed shirts and loose-cut trousers evoked a workwear aesthetic, while Harley-Davidson belts and heavy leather boots added the toughness of American road culture to this world. Patterns derived from a checked shirt he bought as a child quietly wove personal memory into the collection. Nouchi did not romanticise the past; he made it a natural part of today’s wardrobe.
By contrast, sensuality was never built directly. Pointelle cotton tank tops, slightly billowing boxer shorts, lace details borrowed from underwear and sheer layers revealed less the body itself than the space around it. Allure lay not in nudity, but in an open collar, in a strap that seemed about to slip from the shoulder, or in a fabric glimpsed faintly between the layers.
This season’s expansion of the womenswear collection was an extension of the same thinking. Body-hugging dresses with hidden support structures moved alongside tailoring that recalled the powerful silhouettes of 1970s Saint Laurent; as the women’s and men’s wardrobes drew closer, neither lost its identity.
The colour palette completed the narrative. Black, ivory, sand and moss green met the complex browns of Francis Bacon, moving back and forth between the cold atmosphere of misty forests and Lynch’s uncanny universe. The red light that had flooded the hall before the show seemed to place all these characters inside the Red Room itself. You felt less as though you were at a fashion show than wandering between the scenes of a film whose ending you did not know.
Yet the collection’s greatest strength was that none of these cinematic and artistic references ever came before the clothes. In Nouchi’s own words: “It matters that the brand is worn by people. Otherwise, what is the point?” Indeed, David Lynch, Francis Bacon and Twin Peaks remain here only as sources of inspiration. When the show ends, what stays in the mind is not a list of references, but the character created by a strong-shouldered jacket, a pair of wide-legged trousers, a shirt that seems about to fall from the shoulder, or a heavy leather belt.
As the hall emptied, the red light slowly faded. The industrial columns became once again the supports of an ordinary building. But the atmosphere the collection had created did not dissipate. Before my eyes there remained a shirt that seemed about to slip from the shoulder, a heavy Harley-Davidson belt, and those characters who seemed to have stepped out of the mist and to be about to vanish into it again. Louis-Gabriel Nouchi did not retell Twin Peaks; he carried its uncanny silence into today’s wardrobe. Perhaps that is why, once the show was over, what stayed with me was less the clothes than the characters who live on inside them.