PARIS, Oct 5, 2006 / FW / --- On the benches of Salle Delorme at Carrousel du Louvre, Léonard was not only welcoming their guests to the season’s fashion show, but also launching the houses’s new perfume called “L’orchidée”.

The orchid, a flower that the house’s founder has put on silk, and that has, since then become the emblem of this traditional house so famous for its vibrant flower prints. Léonard has cleverly used the same unique technique on the label of its new fragrance bottle as on its legendary prints.

Entirely in the house tradition, the perfume can be so in its own right. But the womenswear also needs a strong impulse of innovation every season, particularly since the time when the floral prints and their vivid colors had made Leonard look so seventies in the eyes of many.

This has been Véronique Leroy’s challenge since she has arrived at the Creative Direction of the house headed and looked over so carefully over the decades by Daniel Tribouillet. It is her goal for Spring 2007 to renew the design of the houses’ ready-to-wear, and she is proposing entirely new features for this collection, searching full twenty-first century recognition.

Véronique Leroy has tried to play with volumes this time, creating rounded and sometimes squared short puff sleeves that seem to follow the season’s general horizontal expansion of the shoulder line.

The popped up sleeves sometimes create a big contrast with the fluid drapes of silk jersey or chiffon. The designer has also tried to mix and match stripes and floral prints on the same outfits. However, these respectable attempts result in diverse appreciations.

Some of her innovations are startling. Take the vanilla and purple organza embroidered dresses. They are definitively innovative, completely recreating the spirit of the house’s prints on the pattern of sequins with which they are embroidered. They certainly are the collection’s stand-out pieces.

Take the complete taming of the colours expressed at its best in the black and white, black and grey prints used without any other colouring on a few looks. They are creative, they will be right in the trend of black and white graphic domination seen everywhere for this spring summer.

But, just because they are too few, they fail, just like the embroidered printed sequins to make a real statement for a genuine creative turn of the house.

Among the accessories presented on the runway, enamelled belt buckles with the orchid could nevertheless be a real success. I would not be surprised if someone had the good idea of making brooches, earrings, even big finger rings out of them. Bags are strangely flat or funnily plump, amusingly disproportioned, but I do not think that their dimensions will make them the best-selling kind.

In a word, caught between its beautiful tradition and the necessity for modernity, the collection dares a little but not enough, bets often on the wrong idea, does not push the good one far enough, tries to preserve its conservative clientele without really creating any success piece for the younger and thus, creates paradoxes.

Take the bathing suits: the wonderful one-piece drapes could qualify for eveningwear with wonderful prints and a great bodyline. Nevertheless, their colours reserve them to be worn by the more mature set of customers. Why not style them for the show on a great pair of tight cropped denims or jersey colourful leggings? It could have changed the way viewers are actually approaching them.

One element says a lot about this house: its 86 looks presented on 24 girls are categorized in the press kit under the different prints displayed in them, creating thus separate groups in the runway show and in the press kit. But even though we know how difficult it is for a ready-to-wear collection to develop its own prints nowadays, the house is presenting and selling clothes, not printed fabrics.

I am not sure that, in this environment, Véronique Leroy can feel really free to conceive clothes for a show in which garment structure would come first. I even think it would take a new, strong and authoritative Creative Director at the head of the house to do so and create here a real design revolution, so that Léonard could continue peacefully to use its polished techniques and know-how to create wonderful flower prints that would really serve their clothes’ style, and not the other way round.

But is the management of the house ready for this turn? Mr. Tribouillet, the CEO of the Groupe Léonard and inventor of the unique printing technique licence owned by Léonard since 1960 takes the bow together with Véronique Leroy, and seems to indicate that he is not. Not yet…

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