Romain Kremer is one of the most important menswear designers today. A fashion insider’s designer, endlessly influential, whose work has done much to arrive at where we are now.
Just as CE and BCE describe the pivot in the documentation of history, this French couturier has his own experience in a pre- and post-timeline. Having begun exploring notions of masculinity and the depiction of the male body before the launch of Instagram in 2010, now in our post-Insta landscape the rest of the world has become very interested in the themes he’s known for. Yet there is only one Romain Kremer: misinterpret that at your peril.
It’s impressive, considering that over the past decade, the designer’s collection has been something of a fashion spectre. While he got on with other things, the Romain Kremer label has been resting, with Kremer guarding his name as extremely as any artist should.
Now, entirely without warning, this sleeping beauty has woken up again.
It is haute couture week in Paris, July 2023. Schiaparelli opens with a show on July 3rd. The strut doesn’t stop: Christian Dior; Chanel; Giorgio Armani; Balenciaga; Jean Paul Gaultier; Valentino; and Fendi all present their handmade, hand-tailored, high artistry collections – the zenith of their metier – for the world’s most elusive, exclusive clients (it’s no coincidence that Mr Armani’s haute couture line is titled ‘Privé’). Kremer, forever the lightning bolt, takes to Instagram to unveil Romain Kremer Sport Couture, a menswear line-up in contrast to the womenswear défilés. Twenty-five looks percolate the feed, one after another – from bikini bottoms and the suggestion of a sleeveless shirt, skating the collarbone; to athletic wear with arm stripes. Track tops, structured shorts with their tiny hemline, and skirt folds have an inherent nobility, the likes of which recall Renaissance portraiture. Some dresses cast sheer over the body, exhibiting the skin. Look closely and raver panelling reminds you of Kremer’s love of thumping, high BPM music and, by extension, the funfairs that that music is heard blaring at. His man projects nothing other than total ease. It’s something that cannot be seen; only experienced in the way he carries himself.
Romain Kremer didn’t invent the ice skater dress. But he has cut it for and put it on a man. If indeed you could call the garment that. There’s the fluency of French high-fashion flair, but if you forget the skirt, the top half has the form-fitting torso familiar from a surfer’s rash vest. The designer’s love of scuba material in the collection has liberated the wetsuit from itself.
If these garments appear simple, at least aesthetically, there’s satisfaction in knowing they are not. The body is at the centre of this triumph of silhouette. Compare Kremer in this sense to the late, legendary Azzedine Alaïa, who was famously devoted to his supermodels and the morphology of Woman.
As the look images, shot against the classic Parisian wall panelling of the designer’s apartment, appeared on iPhone screens, Kremer received a handful of journalists, editors, and stylists at his home to take them through the collection personally. As powerful as its expression was, its introduction was conversely intimate. Chic and exclusive. Like the fashion world of old.
Romain Kremer doesn’t have his sights on the haut monde, however. He wants to see his clothes in the street. On boys racing by on their scooters, or hanging out with attitude on the pavement amongst their friends. Kremer has a massive love of technical clothes, and sportswear. His watershed show of Spring/Summer 2009 – search it out – is just as stunning now as it was then, mixing sheer long dresses with Nike Shox, and protective buckle vests. In fluoro.
“I’d like to work with Arc’teryx, you know?” he reveals. “I think it’s cool. I like the technique, I like the material”. Imagine a Romain Kremer Arc’teryx jacket thrown over a look from his collection – the power of it. What could be, just as easily, part of the wardrobe of those youth in the street. “For a long time, I’ve had this obsession with doing a collaboration with Quiksilver”, he continues. “They already have the knowledge of neoprene; the surf, the scuba – but then you make it into something to wear on an everyday basis. I’m thinking, make the technical more high-fashion and make the high-fashion more technical. There’s a lot of space for it today, the way people style and mix stuff. Some brands are doing it already, actually, in England. Well, they do it their way. It’s not the way I see it, you know?”
Kremer didn’t sit down with the idea of relaunching his label, it just happened. During the pandemic, he felt the compelling need to make clothes as a form of expression again. While the rest of the world was baking banana bread, he was soft-launching a hard comeback.
“I was missing clothes, so during COVID I made a couple of masks and stuff, just to have a bit of fun, which I would send to friends to take a picture. I began making a T-shirt for my boyfriend. I bought some super good quality Japanese rib to make the neck. The colours gave me a bit of an Olympics vibe, gymnastic, Eastern European”. A see-through navy blue T-shirt turned out looking like a mini dress. “I looked at it and had a bit of emotion. It was interesting. I was like, ‘you know what? I’m going to shut my door, turn off my phone, and make a fucking collection’”.
“I made another piece, then another, then another. And I started using neoprene: I found this shop which had neoprene in all these beautiful colours. I was leaving the house once a week just to buy some fabrics. And the other days just sewing stuff and seeing how it looked, trying stuff on myself. I didn’t even have fitting models at this point – it was really back to how I was working when I began [in the 2000s]”.
“I did more and more and more and then I started to think, ‘Okay, so what do I do with it?’” he laughs. Making clothes on his own in his apartment under his own control? Also very Alaïa, who would work solo late at night and present his collection when he wanted to.
“What I’m happy about is that even if you recognise me, I started from scratch. I didn’t take any patterns from the past. I worked in a very free way, very intuitively. In the end, the goal has always been that if I make a dress, you have to forget that it’s a dress you’re looking at”.
“It’s true that what I’ve been fighting for kind of happened while I was not making clothes anymore”, he says directly. “Is there anything that has changed in my mind? Not really. I still love to dress men”.
Kremer hails from Villefranche-de-Rouergue in southern France, halfway between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. He has been going to Biarritz, the historic surfing capital of Europe, since he was a child. Which explains his fascination with neoprene. “Summer was the first time in my life I didn’t go”, he says. “I usually stay for three weeks or a month. I always loved this chic village with waves. A place that when I was a child I would go and have tea in the morning, where Karl Lagerfeld could be sitting in the same bar. Or where you’d see an old lady dressed in Chanel and wearing a hat”.
“There are families, from the grandmother to the grandson, having lunch or a super-later dinner together. You have barefoot guys walking in the city – I’m obsessed with the way surfers dress before and after: the attitude, the waiting, the sitting on the board. All the accessories that they have. I’ve always thought it was very, very fashionable. Even the sun stick – the coloured sunblock on their nose in blue or green; pink or yellow. For me, it’s a very stylish way of life”.
As a youth Kremer did gymnastics. He was a dancer. “I’ve found a lot of inspiration and ideas in people who live their sport, their life. There are elements of fashion where you don’t expect it”.
While Kremer’s own label was resting, he was designing menswear for Mugler, during the era of Nicola Formichetti’s vision. I was at that first menswear show for Autumn/Winter 2011: fans crowded the pavement outside the Garage Turenne, in the way early Alexander McQueen shows brought a rousing crowd. Tattooed models stomped a glitter-strewn catwalk in elegant navy tailoring, latex, and translucent veils. I wrote in i-D magazine at the time, “Kremer is Paris’ poster boy for techno futurism”.
For AnOther magazine’s Spring/Summer ’12 highlights, I followed up: “The scuba/motocross/ sci-fi techno handwriting of Kremer is a perfect fit for the digital man Formichetti is sculpting, so styling his uniform with jeans is about as hardcore as you can get, the future colliding with now and opening eyes to the fact that, yes, these heroic clothes are wearable and, to the right man, even sympathetic”.
Kremer’s relationship with Camper ran from 2009 – 2019, where, after seasons of collaborations, he began working as a consultant before being appointed its first-ever Creative Director in 2014. Kremer repositioned the Spanish footwear brand 360 degrees, introducing a new design philosophy; collaborations with the likes of Kiko Kostadinov, Eckhaus Latta and Isamaya Ffrench; whilst directing wildly imaginative campaigns featuring avatars and monsters. In today’s fashion world, a designer’s mark is left through store architecture just as much as product: Kremer made his with gallery-like CamperLab spaces in Paris’ Marais, London’s Shoreditch and New York’s Lower East Side.
His singular vision has meant he can do it all, even down to casting, styling and photographing editorial in magazines.
One of my favourite Kremer moments was when he called on Studio Harcourt, a Parisian black-and-white photo studio established in 1934 and famous for its images of movie stars, to create portraits of his Autumn/Winter 2010 collection. His models in close crop, bathed in stylised light, became timeless and confusing idols. Seemingly from the past, wearing clothes that looked like they hadn’t been designed yet.
Now the firebrand has come home. Everything else is incomparable to seeing his name, Romain Kremer, on a label again. Legends go everywhere except away.
ROMAIN KREMER
TEXT DEAN MAYO DAVIES
PHOTOGRAPHY ANGELINA MAMOUN-BERGENWALL
FASHION GARY ARMSTRONG
CIRCLEZEROEIGHT #4, 2023/24