PARIS — As the boys’s spring 2024 season opens in Paris with a Pharrell-shaped bang at Louis Vuitton, brands from around the globe are vying for attention on an effervescent schedule. Amongst those WWD has its eye on are Toyko-based Bed j.w. Ford, Parisian label C.R.E.O.L.E., Lagos Space Programme and 4SDesigns.

Bed J.W. Ford

Back on June 25, 2015, designer Shinpei Yamagishi was found attending the Raf Simons show in Paris and that’s where the thought of showing his own label within the French capital began to coalesce.

Eight years later to the day, that’s exactly what he’ll do with the official debut of Bed J.W. Ford, the label he founded in 2010 with Keisuke Kosaka, now the visual director of the brand.

Born in a fishing village within the Ishikawa prefecture on the coast of the Sea of Japan, Yamagishi grew up admiring the fashions of huge cities like Tokyo and Paris from a distance. He’d been developing his personal tackle fashion through remark however the true bolt out of the blue that cinched his path into fashion design was discovering the work of designer Takahiro Miyashita and his Number (N)ine brand.

“If that person had began a women’s line, I’d probably be doing one as well,” he told WWD through a translator, explaining he admired each the brand and Miyashita’s personality.

After graduating from highschool, he headed to Tokyo to pursue fashion. But slightly than go down the classic route of enrolling in a design or fashion college, Yamagishi dove straight into the industry, working as sales staff in a vintage clothing store before starting in PR and sales.

In 2010 he launched Bed J.W. Ford out of a small apartment and commenced offering a vision of dressed up but unfussy elegance that got him the eye of buyers, press and other labels. His first full collection was showcased at Tokyo Fashion Week in 2016 and he won its 2017 award.

The brand now counts some 50 stockists around the globe and is priced between 130 euros for T-shirts and 260 euros for shirts and a median of 400 euros for trousers. Coats are available in lower than 1,000 euros.

Invited as a guest designer at Pitti Uomo 94 in 2018 to present a collaboration with Adidas Originals and a runway show, Yamagishi went on to point out at Milan Fashion Week and collaborated with the likes of Lee and Maison Mihara Yasuhiro. A guerrilla show in January 2020 was meant to mark his debut in Paris, but for the pandemic.

Asked what his favorite a part of the design process is, Yamagishi described textures and the feeling of textiles on the skin as the start of every season, saying that his inspirations derived from his personal observations on the intimate beauty and delicacy of on a regular basis lives. 

For spring 2024, he tapped into the cusp of maturity, with that languid impression of a morning after a protracted night when thoughts and sensations are still fuzzy, telescoping the image of a grown-up man with that languid limberness of youth. — LILY TEMPLETON

C.R.E.O.L.E.

Having his own fashion label “wasn’t the plan,” said Vincent Frederic-Colombo, the 33-year-old designer behind C.R.E.O.L.E., a three-year old brand that was 10 years within the making. “I even constructed my brand in reverse, starting with its visual universe before even attending to the garments.”

Paris-born Frederic-Colombo was raised in Guadeloupe, the French overseas region within the Caribbean. After graduating in product design, pursuing a dual sociology and anthropology degree, and a stint on the HEAD Geneva art and design school, he eased his way into fashion by joining Paris-based retailer Kokon To Zai. In parallel, he laid down the muse for his label in 2013, when he began working with photographer and plastician Fanny Viguier on a multidisciplinary project celebrating the French Caribbean identity.

When the pandemic hit, the following lockdown afforded Frederic-Colombo the chance to put down the foundations for a full-fledged fashion label, including a mirrored image across the name, deemed to be a remnant of colonial tropes. He ultimately decided to rename the brand “Consciousness Relative to Emancipation Overcoming Obstacles” — C.R.E.O.L.E., in brief.

“Should you just try to flee [the implications of the name], that is not going to change the aim. So [the brand name] is about showing one other way, [having] one other option to explain where we’re,” he said.

Workwear is the bedrock of the brand, inflected with a touch of tailoring and peppered with delicate techniques lifted from the womenswear space, akin to lace and crochet. Humor also comes into play — courtesy of his six years working with Bernhard Wilhelm — with items akin to crochet jockstraps or boxer shorts revisited with delicate ruching. With retail prices starting around 100 euros and going as much as 500 euros for jackets, the designer desires to keep his work reasonably priced.

His spring 2024 collection can pay homage to “Coco-La-Fleur, Candidat,” a 1979 French drama following a mild Guadeloupean man who gets roped into an electoral scheme orchestrated by Parisian politicians, considered to be the primary film from the French Antilles.

Frederic-Colombo intends his work as a commentary on how those that emerge from the post-colonial space express themselves. “It’s interesting to point out we will propose something different from the nice, joyful Caribbean cliché of exoticism,” rooting the label in a community that’s “at all times living in crisis, at all times with limits so that they try to seek out joy on the hard reality,” he said. — L.T.

Lagos Space Programme

Fresh off winning the Woolmark Prize, Nigerian designer Adeju Thompson is bringing the Lagos Space Programme label to Paris after two seasons in Milan. Titled “Cloth as Queer Archive,” the spring collection might be shown at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday as a part of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode’s Sphere showroom.

Billed as a dialogue between Africa and the West celebrating the merino wool fiber and its versatility, the nonbinary line melds tailored pieces, some lined with the indigo-dyed Adire cloth made in southwestern Nigeria, and looser pieces just like the label’s signature Yoruba wide pants, that are especially popular in Japan.

Thompson was excited to walk within the footsteps of design heroes like Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo and Raf Simons, who all made their name within the French capital. 

“I like what Raf did within the early Aughts and why those shows were essential. I need to be that person. I need to share where I come from, . I need to create shows that basically spark the imagination and I’m excited that I won the Woolmark Prize, so it implies that there may be this momentum with me,” Thompson said.

The designer has been spending time in Europe as a part of a residency on the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, where they’ve explored a trove of historical Nigerian costumes collected by anthropologist Brigitte Menzel within the ‘60s. Along with visiting museums and galleries, Thompson has picked up vintage pieces from the ‘30s to the ‘50s for his or her archive.

“I see myself as an everlasting student of fashion and I’m very aware of fashion history, and have tried to border LSP as a label that’s attempting to create a really fresh conversation,” they said. “I do know that’s something that’s very hard to do in fashion because all the things has been said and done, but I do feel like Lagos Space Programme has something very unique to contribute to the worldwide dialogue.” — JOELLE DIDERICH

4SDesigns

Angelo Urrutia is not any stranger to fashion. Born in El Salvador, he migrated to Recent York as a baby and since embracing the apparel industry as a profession, has worked for quite a lot of brands including Barbour, Reebok, Recent Balance, Adidas, Hoka and, most notably, Nepenthes America, the U.S. arm of the Japanese retailer and owner of Engineered Garments, Needles and other brands, for which he had worked for greater than twenty years.

At Nepenthes, he oversaw the opening of its Recent York store in addition to its collaborations with brands as varied as Adidas and Trickers.

But in October 2019, he decided it was time to branch out on his own and the result was 4SDesigns, a line of contemporary American sportswear crafted in Italy and centered around comfort, lightness and performance. Urrutia launched the road in Paris in January 2020 in a short lived space he present in town. “I didn’t have a showroom, or PR — I used to be just alone,” he recalled. “And we landed excellent accounts: Mr Porter, Ssense, numerous independents. It was a extremely great start — after which COVID-19 happened.”

Luckily his experience had taught him the infrastructure he needed to determine before creating a group, so he was in a position to produce and ship his line.

His good luck has continued, along with his collection now being sold in Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Kith and other retailers within the U.S., in addition to quite a few stores in Italy, Ireland, England, the Netherlands, Sweden and Asia.

He also caught the eye of the team on the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, which chosen him as certainly one of its finalists for this 12 months’s $300,000 award, in addition to the Federation de la Haute Couture in Paris, which invited him onto the official calendar. The 4SDesigns presentation might be on Sunday.

“We’re going to do a small presentation since it wasn’t necessarily within the bandwidth for us to do anything big in the meanwhile,” he said. “But you’ll be able to’t really say no to that chance.”

The gathering he’ll show in Paris might be true to the brand’s DNA, which Urrutia described as “a really particular American experience with a Recent York lens.”

“I actually have very high esteem for the classics of Seventh Avenue like Perry Ellis and Ralph Lauren who’re the head of contemporary American design,” he said. “I attempt to take European savoir faire and Americanize it. For higher or worse, it’s not precious, it’s more tactile for every single day.”

That translates into all the things from suit separates to yoga outfits designed with vintage and military references.

Urrutia also designs around 80 percent of his fabrics so he can higher “tell my story in a multilayered fashion that resonates with my customer base.”

For his spring collection, he’ll showcase his tackle casual dress-up in long-sleeve shirts and short blazers in lightweight fabrics that pay homage to Fifties jazz musicians. Lots of the more tailored pieces have linings — “I at all times love linings within the summertime” — and he experimented with a deconstructed blazer that he described as “almost backless. I wanted to actually attack the thought of getting dressed up in the heat,” he said.

He addressed that through the fabrics, which include a striped organza that appears like seersucker but is printed with an abstract floral camo pattern.

“After which I at all times juxtapose that with my idea of workwear,” he continued. “I actually have a utility pant that’s a double knee pant in a silk sateen with very beautiful drape and movement. It’s Americana but soft and tender.”

He also pointed to a raffia striped tweed that he created with the French mill Bacus that he’ll use for a piece shirt in an effort to “humanize it more.” And the gathering features a whole lot of silk — a latest fabric for 4SDesigns.

Looking beyond Paris, Urrutia said he’ll work to “stabilize the pace of all of it and get my rhythm, really bond with my customer base, create my community, gather my tribe.”

That tribe tends to be older and skilled, but he has discovered that his line appeals to a large swath of individuals. “I forged an enormous net because America is such a dynamic place, filled with so many various cultures and subcultures. I put a whole lot of my central American background in the road, but at its core, it’s American sportswear,” he said.

He had done trunk shows last 12 months that were successful and he also created some special product for his wholesale accounts akin to Nordstrom. A pop-up that he opened in Recent York City was also a win.

Even when he doesn’t win the CFDA prize, 4SDesigns still has one investor, Enzo Ricci, an entertainment executive from 3 Marys Entertainment who desired to get into fashion, who helps finance the business. “He lets me work at my very own pace, which may be very liberating and freeing to me,” he said. — JEAN E. PALMIERI