Fashion label flushes tradition by hosting Paris show in a toilet block

Models present creations from the Fall/Winter 2017/18 Ready to Wear collection by Sirloin in a toilet block during Paris Fashion Week. EPA/ETIENNE LAURENT

Paris fashion week shows tend to be held at the city’s most opulent addresses, grand chandeliered salons dripping with marble and gilt.

But new brand Sirloin flushed that tradition down the toilet by presenting its debut collection in one of the French capital’s most well appointed toilets.

Designers Mao Usami and Alve Lagercrantz said their odd choice of venue was meant to pay tribute to “a place that allows the trivial, silly yet brilliant questions and ideas in life flow free”.

They said it was time to bring the smallest room out of the closet as models opened the mahogany cubicle doors of the historic Madeleine conveniences to reveal their autumn/winter collection.

Usami, who has worked for Louis Vuitton and Dries Van Noten, said toilets were the world’s great refuges. They are the place where you go to hide “when you are pretending you are working, but you are just escaping and having a break,” she said.

“We encourage everyone to accept their own twisted thoughts and strangest habits. The worse, the better!”

The award-winning Shanghai-based duo, who are Japanese and Swedish respectively, said they built their collection from the underwear out, “merging lingerie with ready-to-wear” suits and streetwear.

Invitations to the show came with a vanity pack of folded toilet paper. The designers insisted, however, that the venue was not a stunt, claiming the collection “focuses on the intellectual questions that every Sirloin girl would ask herself during their brief moments in the toilet”.

Agence France Presse