LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT: In October, Charles de Vilmorin landed in Hong Kong determined to wow the city’s glitterati with his work.
Instead, he and Nikita Vlassenko, his stylist and photographer friend who has become a regular collaborator of the fashion brand, fell in love with the Asian metropolis.
“The first morning, we woke up super early due to jetlag and went strolling in the streets at 5 a.m. and we discovered so many things,” de Vilmorin said.
Meanwhile, Vlassenko said they were also struck by a city peppered with contrasts, between the hyper-modern and the traditional, the luxurious and the humble.
“There wasn’t a goal of ‘making beautiful images’ but we wanted to keep an anchored memento,” Vlassenko said. “Hong Kong and Charles are diametrical opposites, so having the two encounter each other was crazy so we thought ‘let’s capture this.’”
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Armed with nothing but an iPhone — and the fall 2024 couture collection — they captured models wearing de Vilmorin’s designs in traditional cafés, side streets and fish markets but also everyday objects and phrases like “to purify character to the highest possible degree,” found scrawled on a pavement.
The resulting images are collected in “查爾斯·德·維爾莫蘭 in Hong Kong,” or “Charles de Vilmorin in Hong Kong” with the designer’s name phonetically spelled out in traditional Chinese characters, an art book unveiled Thursday during a dinner at Caprice, a buzzy wine bar that hosts culinary residencies.
De Vilmorin said the book was the result of “three loves”: his emotion at discovering Hong Kong, a city he had never visited before taking part in October’s “Virtuose: The Artistry of Couture” group show; his friendship with Vlassenko, and the one for his team, who “carried the project up at arm’s length with passion and devotion.”
That made Catherine Baba coo, “aww, devotion” — her catchphrase — which drew delighted chuckles from a crowd that included Lesage artistic director Hubert Barrère, artist Bilal Hassani as well as couture collectors Fredrik Robertsson and Jordan Roth.
After a menu that started with pencil leeks and ended with sea buckthorn cream topped with coconut milk mousse, the evening continued with a party DJ’d by Laura Darmon, best known for her roles as buyer, director and business development for China-based concept stores ENG and founder-slash-chief executive officer of production-to-retail platform Envision.
And Hong Kong is only the first stop, Vlassenko revealed. “We decided we would take up this concept of cruise that designers do and reinterpret the collections shown in Paris in a different city each season,” he said.
While the stylist and photographer wouldn’t be drawn into spilling the destination for spring 2025, he said it had been shot the weekend before Paris Fashion Week.
Printed in a limited run of 500, including 200 which have been bound with red thread, de Vilmorin and Vlassenko’s Hong Kong artbook is priced at 45 euros for the hand-finished versions and 40 euros for the other 300 copies.
It will be exclusively available at the Ephemera bookstore in Paris from Thursday.
