They taught me that fashion does change, but when you’re someone who is genuine with your style, you just want to express yourself. How did the women in your family – Princess Grace and Princess Stéphanie – influence your love of fashion? It’s a time-consuming part of the pattern-making process, because actually it really does have to fit every body. Now we have sizes for the pants and buttons on the waistband that you can adjust to wear them high-waisted or low-waisted. For our trousers, we make a few different sizing options, because obviously the bottom of people is very different from one person to the other. If I design a shirt, I try it on different body shapes and genders so we can adjust the places where we might need some space for the reality of people’s bodies. That’s actually really interesting, because body- shape is a really big part of the process of pattern making. How does your desire to be representative of all gender expression affect your design process? I usually have an idea, and then look at colours and shapes I draw a lot and take a lot of photos that inspire me – from architecture and art, to my friends and people in the street whose look I love. The first collection was really inspired by the contrast between the south of France and New York – the luxury of the Riviera and the more raw side of urban life – while my new collection was inspired by the nightlife in New York. What inspires the colours and shapes of your collections? I wanted to mix these two values for Alter, because I really wanted my fashion line to have a purpose and a message. As a creative, I grew up in New York, and it was there that I faced a lot of difficulties with my friends in the LGTBQ* community to find a resonance in fashion for them. Now I’m trying to source fabrics even more responsibly, in terms of certification for silk, cottons and more. The first one is equal responsibility: it started as an upcycling idea, so there’s no production of denim or leather. Pauline, could you tell us about the ethos at the heart of Alter? Here, Ducruet shares her style inspirations, design philosophy and approach to creating clothing designed for all. Ducruet’s grandmother was silver screen icon Grace Kelly, who became the Princess of Monaco when she married HSH Prince Ranier III in 1956. Her mother, Princess Stéphanie of Monaco, started her own fashion career as an apprentice of Christian Dior’s head designer Marc Bohan in 1983, launched a swimwear collection in 1986, and has modelled for publications including Vogue and Vanity Fair. While Ducruet’s resumé is impressive, her first exposure to high fashion was from her family’s substantial style credentials. The collection is stocked online on boutique and eco-responsible platforms, such as Wolf & Badger, and available at Galeries Lafayette in Nice, with pop-ups and expansions in the works for 2022. “Alter started as an upcycling brand – I showed my first runway show in Paris in 2019, and then the second in February 2020,” she says. But, where many brands grow to embrace responsible fashion, sustainability was always at Alter’s core. The designer cut her fashion teeth working for the likes of Rabih Kayrouz, Louis Vuitton and Vogue Paris before launching Alter in 2018.
And it makes me want to see if I can do that.“I always wanted to have my own, beautiful fashion line, but it was always important to also to have a message and a purpose behind it,” Ducruet, 27, says of the brand, which holds community and eco-responsibility at its core.
It still surprises me how well it works in all these different ways on movie posters, street tags, tattoos and logos. Perhaps it's utterly appropriate that these letterforms are still soaked in duality, given their source. Church spires and Compton alleys at the exact same time. I can't believe that one hand style can connote piety, in one context, and, murder in another.
Now when I look at that type of writing, I see so many more things. I still can't, and I am jealous of others who can. They were a mystery I could never quite understand. As a kid in 5th and 6th grade, I graduated from notebook doodling to calligraphy and spent hours and hours trying to perfect those gorgeous black-letter double strokes, liquid curves and swashes. The place from which I set out, abandoned but cannot escape. But I can tell you of an enduring typographic fascination and enthusiasm if that counts. Perhaps it's yet to be discovered in some dusty type drawer in a small southern town somewhere: Southern Italy or Southern Carolina, either would suit me just fine. Eric Graves, Senior Designer at Baker Brand Communications