HYÈRES, France — Belgian designer Igor Dieryck won the highest prize on the thirty eighth edition of the International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Accessories — Hyères on Sunday, wowing the jury headed by Charles de Vilmorin with chiseled designs inspired by hotel staff uniforms.

Based in Paris, the 2022 graduate of Antwerp Royal Academy of Effective Arts hailing from the south of Belgium is working as a junior designer in menswear at Hermès.

Titled “Yessir,” his unisex collection was inspired by his student job as a receptionist in a hotel, exploring the interactions between people from all walks of life and questioning “the place of hotel staff inside their establishment.”

“The uniform is de facto this concept of adding a layer onto your essence and it modifies the perception people have but probably not ‘you,’” he said through the finalists’ showroom.

His work was “a complete crush” for the jury, said de Vilmorin lauding “a group [that was] hyper creative, poetic but in addition super real and desirable that would stretch into multiple seasons in the longer term.”

Among the many standouts were the opening look, a groom clad in a cropped jacket and trousers with a high waistline that gave legs for days and a jaunty pillbox hat; trousers with a trompe-l’oeil mashing extreme baggy jeans, tailored slacks and boxer shorts, and a jeans jacket that was a millefeuille of materials each casual and delicate.

Due to a down jacket with a hood inspired by a feather duster, crafted in collaboration with Lemarié, Dieryck also scooped up the Le19M Métiers d’Arts Prize in partnership with Chanel, which comes with a 20,000-euro purse for a project to be exhibited at next 12 months’s festival.

The L’Atelier des Matières Prize and its 10,000 euros price of materials went to Sweden’s Petra Fagerstrom, for her work inspired by her grandmother, who was a parachutist in the previous Soviet Union.

She impressed by developing a method to create lenticular images in fabric using pleating, used to precise the duality between the truth of, say, a floral nightgown and one’s dreams. In her grandmother’s case, it had been a mental image of California as a “utopian everlasting sunset” taken from a postcard, juxtaposed together with her life under a totalitarian regime.

Cut from materials that included an upcycled parachute and deadstock leathers, the “Grand-mère Volante” collection also netted Fagerstrom the Mercedes-Benz Sustainability Prize, which distinguishes the designer who best applied eco-conception practices of their work.

Fagerstrom, who intends to launch her brand and is within the Swedish Fashion Council’s five-year incubator program, can be keen to search out partners in textile innovation and sustainability to further her research in those fields.

The edition had been particularly diverse in inspiration, with designers digging deep into themselves to speak about how they felt of their bodies, processing grief or the worldwide geopolitical context. “They were boundlessly generous, inspired by joyful moments or difficult episodes,” de Vilmorin said.

Given his age, the 26-year-old fashion jury president saw the competition “more as an exchange than a judgment on their work,” saying he’d been particularly drawn by those whose work allowed him to project how they’d evolve in “two, three, 10 years.” 

The accessories grand prize went to Swiss designer Gabrielle Huguenot, for designs she described as “impetuous and vengeful” that ranged from unwearable shoes that had spikes inside and outdoors, to spiny jewelry and bags that looked halfway between practical and potentially lethal. 

“Other than the work, there’s a world round her. You would see that she knows already who she is and is confident in that,” accessories jury president Alan Crocetti said. While her work was intricate and shut to art pieces, the jury could see it translating right into a commercially viable reality. She embodied the recommendation of “keep doing whatever crazy things are in your head but understand that folks should give you the option to have it as accessories — it’s a balance,” that he’d give for anyone looking to determine a brand.

German designer Christiane Schwambach received a special mention from the accessories jury.

Victor Salinier, a graduate of Geneva’s HEAD fashion school, rose to the challenge of using only leather for an adjunct of their selection for this 12 months’s Hermès prize submission, a constraint that encouraged designers to step outside of their creative universes, said the French luxury house’s creative director of fashion accessories Clémande Burgevin Blachman.

She lauded Salinier’s use of leatherworking crafts but in addition the “great poetry” of his headdress that evoked a toddler perched on their parent’s shoulders.

Blachman noted that candidates leaned toward innovation and experimentation, had often rooted their submissions in childhood memories and thought of notions of beauty and ornamentation.

As is now tradition, finalists might be exhibiting their work in Paris on Wednesday and Thursday as a part of the annual Supima Design Lab, alongside the works of the 2023 Supima Design Competition finalists and a collection of designers including including Niccolò Pasqualetti, Victor Weinsanto and Vincent Pressiat.

In photography, Paris- and Lausanne, Switzerland-based Thaddé Comar scored the the 7L Photography Grand Prize together with his work documenting the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, exploring specifically the devices utilized by demonstrators attempting to mitigate increasingly sophisticated methods of control. 

The American Vintage prize went to self-taught Senegalese artist Souleymane Bachir Diaw, who is predicated in Paris, for “Sutura, the silent voice of men,” questioning masculinity through a wardrobe in motion. Kin Coedel, who lives and works between Paris and Shanghai, won the general public photography prize. 

Along with the runway shows and the style, photography and accessories competition, there have been also loads of workshops, book signings and musical performances to maintain visitors entertained throughout the weekend in Hyères.

Among the many exhibitions remaining open to the general public until Jan. 14 were “Esprits Libres,” with a recreation of designer Stéphane Ashpool’s studio as he creates looks for the French national team ahead of the Paris Olympics in 2024, and “Les Nuits d’Été,” (or “summer nights”), where designer Pierre Yovanovitch reimagined the summer residence of the Noailles couple.

Delving into the home’s archives, he matched his finds with latest commissions to recreate a surreal bedroom, boudoir or music room — the perfect setting for “Garde-Robe(s),” curated by Emilie Hammen with pieces starting from a recreated Chanel high fashion dress from fall 1930 to a bespoke Ester Manas design.

Throughout the Villa were also dozens of portraits of Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles by contemporary artists.

Creating using the tools and languages of the times was at the guts of the roundtables organized by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, which checked out artificial intelligence for this edition.

“You will have to appropriate AI and never the opposite way around,” was the lesson the FHCM’s executive president Pascal Morand wanted the audience to recollect.

Participants, including Launchmetrics chief executive officer Michael Jais; Laurence Devillers, professor of artificial intelligence on the Sorbonne university and member of the digital ethics committee; Eric Peters, deputy head of unit accountable for the European Commission’s Strategy for the Digital Decade 2030, and Meta’s global head of luxury Morin Oluwole, went over the most recent innovations on this domain and latest models; the moral, social and legal challenges of generative AI, and the opportunities it brought for creation.

“The prompt is a tool identical to looms or sewing machines,” said Denis Bonnay, an associate professor in philosophy at Paris Nanterre University, highlighting AI’s capability to “discover a type of coherence we wouldn’t have expected” from seemingly disparate elements.

Engineer, entrepreneur and artist Paul Mouginot said AI was “a tool, not a medium” and insisted on the importance of getting a private vocabulary to feed into AI models.”

Humans aren’t quite surplus to requirements yet, agreed Samuel N. Bernier, leader of design and innovation at digital transformation consulting firm Onepoint. “Now we have the concept AI will proceed progress without us but it surely needs us to feed it. If we give it its own production, it tends to go around in circles and even collapse.”

Speakers also often identified how embedded AI already is in our on a regular basis life, be it Amazon shopping advice or fraud detection.

The prizes were a highlight of the weekend in Hyères, however the four-day event was also a chance for industry newcomers and insiders to satisfy and form lasting links.

Icicle president Vanessa Yao revealed that’s how the brand tapped 2021 winner Ifeanyi Okwuadi, who has since joined its Paris design studio.

Meeting the opposite finalists was an end result Finnish finalist Leevi Ikäheimo was already pleased with ahead of the outcomes. “Though our aesthetics are totally different, we now have the identical values, passion and take care of [the] future. If and once we go places, becoming individuals who have power resolve, I would like to consider we’ll use it to make this industry higher – more sustainable, socially sustainable and more inclusive.”

Festival founder and general director Jean-Pierre Blanc said this edition highlighted “the generosity and the importance of youth,” which is the essence of the festival created in 1985.

While he wouldn’t be drawn into speculating on what type of profession awaited the contestants, he noted “many things [are] possible today in fashion weren’t 20 years ago,” akin to the appointment of Botter’s Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh to the creative helm of Nina Ricci within the wake of their Hyères win in 2018.

The style, photography and accessories festival has helped raise the profiles of talents akin to Viktor & Rolf; Saint Laurent artistic director Anthony Vaccarello, and Paco Rabanne’s Julien Dossena.

Blanc was also left touched by this 12 months’s young jury presidents “giving as much to the general public but in addition the youth they are going to see over the weekend,” through exhibitions, masterclasses and jury sessions, saying it matched Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles’ proclivity for very young artists for this edition through the Villa Noailles centenary.

“The Salvador Dali and Alberto Giacometti [they commissioned] weren’t ‘Dali’ and ‘Giacometti’ we remember today, they were talented 20-somethings,” he said.