Katerin Theys: The Architecture of the Body

In a week of a hundred shows, Belgian interior architect-turned-designer Katerin Theys chose a residence over a runway.

The One You Remember

Paris Fashion Week asks a lot of its audience. The schedule runs from early morning to well past midnight, and the invitations stack up. By the third day, even the most devoted eye starts to glaze. Finding the name you will still be talking about a month later is not easy. In fact, most seasons it simply doesn’t happen. This season it did, and not on a runway. Katerin Theys, a Belgian interior architect based in Hong Kong since 2013, presented her work in Paris for the first time. Her venue was the Residence of the Ambassador of Belgium to France.

The guests were an international crowd from fashion, design and art. They came for a debut, but found a conversation between architecture, clothing and art, held room by room.

Katerin Theys: A House in Chapters

Theys didn’t build a set. Instead, she used the one she was given. H.E. Jo Indekeu, Ambassador of Belgium to France, and Mrs. Dagmar Indekeu hosted the evening. It unfolded through the historic residence as an evolving installation. Silhouettes occupied one room, objects and materials another, while music and live artistic interventions threaded between them. You didn’t watch the collection pass by. You walked through it.

In one room, a single coat from her “Winter Garden” collection appeared six different ways. Its print comes from memories of her grandmother’s garden. Watching the same piece reinvent itself six times said more about her method than any lookbook could.

Elsewhere, Selah Sue performed a live set wearing three of her designs. The Belgian singer-songwriter, like Theys, comes from Leuven. The two first worked together when Theys dressed her for her European tour. Indeed, that connection showed: the clothes moved with the voice instead of competing with it.

Meanwhile, artist Nicky Myny gave a live demonstration that opened up the collaborative process behind the work. A glimpse of Theys’ collaboration with Danish textile house Kvadrat brought the evening back to where she began, in interiors.

After a week of black boxes and bleachers, it was refreshing. Here was a setting with its own history, and clothes that seemed to belong in it.

Katerin Theys: Architecture for the Body

Theys calls her work “architecture for the body,” and it isn’t a slogan. It’s training. Before she made clothes, she made spaces, and she still thinks like someone who does. Her forthcoming summer collection, Sketchbook, brings together architectural coats, reversible silhouettes and caftans that transform. Proportion shifts with the way a person wears a piece. Structure becomes something the wearer gets to decide.

“For me, it’s my two worlds, my background in architecture and my fashion collection, coming together,” she says. “The craftsmanship and details in the architecture are things I love to bring into my collection.”

You see it in how she handles textiles: the way an architect handles a material, for its structure first and its surface second. For example, her Body of Architecture project, developed with Kvadrat and Conran and Partners, takes the idea literally. It moves between interior textiles and the body as if the line between them had never really been there.

In addition, there is the other layer. More than a decade in Hong Kong has given her work a dialogue between European heritage and Asian influence. It reads less like a reference and more like a way of seeing.

Something Not Seen Before

It has become a cliché to say everything has already been done. In fashion it is mostly true. Silhouettes return, references recycle, and novelty is often just a new mood board. Theys gets around this by arriving from somewhere else. Her vocabulary comes from buildings, from rooms, from the way people move through space. As a result, her clothes look unfamiliar without trying to be.

Similarly, her approach to the business is just as considered. She doesn’t follow the seasonal cycle. Instead, she produces pieces in small runs, some as one-offs. They change with the person who wears them and collect their own story over time. In a week built entirely around what’s next, that patience is a statement of its own.

Paris has no shortage of debuts. Very few make you want to walk back into the room. This one did.

Explore the collections at Katerin Theys’ official website.

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For another perspective on architecture and clothing, read IRK’s conversation with Mimi Plange.