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Romane Glandier channels the brutality and chaos of Paris

Making the horror and beauty of Paris wearable

Glandier’s graduate collection emanates from the dark beauty of the sometimes troubled Parisian suburbs. A product of the BA in fashion design at IFM and Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Glandier offers a reflexive response to the insolence of the French capital.

Life in the city becomes art, becomes fashion. “I tend to do my process and live my life experiences in a very spontaneous way,” Glandier explains. A snapped stiletto as she biked to college became her signature reversed heels.

Glandier’s Paris is a live, webbed organism. Her work is part of its entity and she taps into its chaos to create the divine. Beyond the superficiality of beauty, Glandier touches the harsh and sombre. Underpinning her creations is Edmund Burke’s philosophy of the sublime. Burke believed that images implying mortality elicit more powerful responses than ideas of pleasure. Nature can be strikingly beautiful, and overwhelming. The sublime is terrible and attractive. It is rooted in fear and yet invites admiration.

Biking to IFM, Glandier saw the horror and beauty of Paris. The brutal remains of the Paris riots and the cold sorrow etched a bleakly beauty. Glandier photographs these textures and posits them as the poetry of the street. Her visual poems capture “the interaction between objects, nature, humans and time,” which often goes unnoticed. The resulting album of city textures was the progenitor of Glandier’s graduate collection, Chainsuck.

Functioning as a metaphor for our era, ‘Chainsuck’ is “the tendency of a chain to stick to chain rings and [to] be sucked up into the bicycle.” The personified entity of The City hosts scenes of brutality and chaos. Chainsuck explores the beauty of destruction while acknowledging its suffocating fabric. The collection’s signature drape is based on suction movement, such as strangulation around the neck. It is a memento mori.

“Chainsuck is an urban ecosystem, an analogy of classes, an insolent and raw nervous tissue, a bruised environment, with an antinomic lexical field, with rimmed eyes, white skies, chrome lakes and featherless crows,” says Glandier. “Chainsuck is an allegorical language that portrays the essence of an era.”

Glandier’s work is dominated by what she coins the ‘crash form’. Inspired by J. G. Ballard’s book ‘Crash’, destruction informs her creative process. Her garments are wearable organs of an insolent city made beautiful. And since its IFM debut, Chainsuck continues to grow. It is alive and evolving. Glandier’s melted silver top “is one of the remains of urban furniture that melted during violent riots that took place in 2023. The day after the riots, Paris was left silent, in mourning, covered [in] melted cars … ashes [and] craters.” Objects circulate through different spatial and temporal regimes of value as they move through different hands, contexts and uses. Glandier is able to assign value to devastation through beauty.

Since graduating IFM, Glandier has been interning as an assistant RTW and haute couture designer at Schiaparelli. However, her career hasn’t always gone smoothly. Glandier’s first experience of studying fashion was at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts during the pandemic. She and a third of the class didn’t receive a diploma. In despair, Glandier moved to Paris and interned as a designer for Courrèges. From there she joined IFM’s third year students, which allowed her to produce Chainsuck. IFM permitted Glandier to “empty [her] bag and see all the things that could be done.”

Experimenting with the techniques that were taught has evolved her practice and furthered Glandier’s self-sufficiency as a designer. Yet graduation can come as a shock. Despite her long road of education, Glandier is still working uphill towards job stability. Her ambition is to have her own brand and to work with peers she admires. Glandier wants fashion to be a place of integrity, adapted to society’s current cultural dimension. Whether working for herself or a brand she admires, Glandier hopes to design and produce mindfully.