JEANNE FRIOT SPRING/SUMMER 24 “SIRENS”
Mythological creatures, objects of dreams and anguish, who knows the story of mermaids?
For the spring-summer 2024 season, Jeanne Friot takes up the mythological figure of the mermaid, a hybrid body constantly in the making. Half-female, half-fish or bird, depending on the story, she escapes patriarchal epistemology, a metaphor for the queer body – a body that invents itself and, to continue to exist, must constantly fight. On March 3, the Senate Bill 14 banned drag shows in Tennessee. A few days later, the state of Kentucky passed a law aimed at repressing the rights of trans people, denying minors access to the care they need to make their transitions properly.
It is for these bodies, these lives, that the siren song resounds today – like a cry for help.
Almost two centuries earlier, in 1837, Hans Christian Anderson created his own siren in a tale that became the glittering utopia of our childhoods. What we missed was Anderson’s self-censorship, and the sobbing of a repressed desire – the Little Mermaid was him, him and a homosexual love then inaudible.
The mermaid was the unspeakable. The other identity, the denied identity, the strange identity – the queer identity.
The mute metaphors of the past find new resonance in this collection.
SIRENS is a restorative collection*
SIRENS is a cry for help
SIRENS is a song of hope
Like narratives that are deconstructed and reconstructed, the collection is made up of old clothes, deconstructed and reconstructed – jeans are pelted and unknitted, shirts are cut up and reassembled. Screams of alarm are inscribed on wide black bags from a collaboration with Cahu.
– The term “reparative reading” is borrowed from Closet Epistemology, the foundation of queer theory written by thinker Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in 1990;
JEANNE FRIOT is a SUSTAINABLE AND GENDERLESS fashion brand based in Paris. With limited series of products and a strong arts and crafts feeling. Jeanne Friot is a reaction, an answer, and the solution. Established around a place where boundaries are forgotten. Developed by a rough and contemporary energy. Jeanne Friot is a mirror reflecting our multiple identities.
published by Nadia ten Hove