Twelve years ago, when he was first starting out, Mossi Traoré managed somehow to stage a fashion show in Père-Lachaise cemetery. Absent an encore of that feat—a highly impressive one, given the red tape involved—the designer instead chose the blank canvas of an empty space on the Rue Commines. But he kept the inspiration, revisiting a conversation he once had with a woman who claimed to live in the cemetery among the tombs and their countless stories lost to time.
“I like finding inspiration in death, it’s a very peaceful oasis over there,” said Traoré before the show, adding, “I find that solitude, sadness, and anger help me create more easily than when I’m happy.”
Constructed like a week in that woman’s life, “Mon Amie La Mort” (“My Friend, Death”) unfolded as the designer imagined she might live, as if the city’s largest cemetery were a neighborhood in Paris with its own galleries, fleas, weddings, and candlelit suppers among the graves.
But rather than wallow in melancholy, Traoré instead turned to the hands-on business of materials and movement. As it happens, he is working on an exhibition that will open at the MuCEM museum in Marseille next May. During his many visits to France’s second-largest city, he seized on the idea of parasols folded up on the beach, which here reappeared as pleated, draped and sculpted dresses like the one that opened today’s show and, further on, a pair of black bloomers.
This collection found Traoré back on home turf, revisiting techniques learned firsthand from his late mentor, Josette Thomas, a seamstress who had worked for the designer’s all-time idol, Madame Grès. The strongest looks here reconnected with that lineage in white—a pretty bustier top, a sleeveless summer dress with a short, asymmetrical draped skirt; a lovely goddess gown—or black, for example in hand-pleated organza affixed to a T-shirt dress base or an architectural look Traoré described as “the bride wore black.” Transient fall colors seem to be sticking around for spring, and here Traoré gamely offered a tombstone-and-wilted-bouquet palette of gray, yellow, brown and dusty rose on a smattering of bustiers and dresses.
Exploring the contradictions and potential affinities between couture and everyday clothes is one of Traoré’s signatures. Here, the inspiration might have seemed dark, but somehow walking among lives once lived helped him bring a feeling of light and playfulness back to his work.
