In Memoriam: Casablanca, 1950. JC/DC’s Pre-Collection FW 14/15

The past is very much present in French designer JC/DC’s Pre-Collection FW 14/15. The
line includes dresses, jackets, tunics, and coats whose updated, exotic desert style and bronze, blue, and turquoise shades recollect North Africa circa 1950, particularly JC/DC’s birthplace of Casablanca, Morocco. The contemporary look of each of the 22 pieces is filtered through a retro lens, tinting the modern, while hinting of the past.

Officially titled the Marquis Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, “JC/DC” takes inspiration from his childhood memories to turn out an impressive collection that interweaves North African tones, geometries, and styles with a continental French feel. Look 6, for instance, impressively upsets the traditional diamond-quilted french Matelassé pattern, which occupies only a third of the final piece. A standing collar and a bronze- and blue-laced belt combine to lend volume and symmetry to the jacket, while the tribal hieroglyphic imprint simultaneously fills that volume with a nostalgic exoticism and artistically disrupts the symmetry. The result is a paradoxically post-modern rendition of an already retro-modern jacket, which reinforces the designer’s choice, in this line, to sensitively incorporate the past into a progressive conceptualization of the current.

Photography by JC/DC