“We Have To Elevate How We Make Clothes – Change That And You Can Change Fashion”: Lucas Ossendrijver On His New Theory Project

It’s been a minute since Lucas Ossendrijver was making headlines. The Dutch designer exited Lanvin back in 2018, after 14 years at the French label, where he invented its menswear codes more or less from scratch and was at least partly responsible for ushering in the high-fashion sneaker trend that still dominates today, but lately he’s been busy behind the scenes. Last July, Theory announced it had hired Ossendrijver to design capsule collections. Many Paris-New York roundtrips ensued, and come next month his first offering for the company, which has long specialised in wear-to-work tailoring, will arrive in stores.

“I’ve always liked Theory as a brand and what it stands for,” Ossendrijver told me from an August vacation in Bali. “There’s something very pragmatic about it, and that I felt kind of close to as a design philosophy. Also, because Theory is a big company, the decisions you make have an impact. We work a lot with sustainable fabrics – recycled wools, recycled nylons – and the impact is real. It’s not a niche brand, it’s not just marketing, and it’s not a runway show where you have to seduce with extreme propositions. It’s on a very human scale in that sense. It felt more relevant to do that than to try to do another luxury or another show collection. That, and the opportunity to do womenswear next to menswear is what drew me in.”

Despite his luxury credentials, Ossendrijver has always found much of his inspiration on the streets and in resale shops. “I love people watching, but what really got me into fashion was looking at clothes, how they are made.” His rosebud, if you will, was a 1920s jacket he bought at a flea market. “I kind of picked it apart and saw everything inside, but I didn’t understand at the time what it was there for – all these techniques, these stitchings, these hand-done things. And that actually drew me into fashion. I wanted to know how things are made.”

Ossendrijver keeps a large archive of clothes and, to this day, he’s very hands-on. “I like to be able to get into clothes and to use them as material,” he said. Instead of drawing, he’ll make collages and try things on the mannequin or a model, and after that comes the fun part: “Then I start playing around and twisting.” Paging through these images, which were photographed by David Sims, he happily talked details. “The men’s jacket is completely unlined with a bit of stretch, so it’s like a cardigan when you wear it.” For women, there’s a T-shirt dress in silk whose sleeves are cut, somewhat unusually, in one piece with the body. “I really wanted ease,” he explained.

Movement was another guiding principle. With its tiers of écrasé pleats, another silk dress nods ever so slightly in the direction of the late Alber Elbaz, Ossendrijver’s former colleague and mentor at Lanvin, whose clothes, despite their utter fabulousness, always made the woman, and not the other way around. “Alber,” Ossendrijver said, “was like a father and a brother at the same time. The thing that I learned from him that was the most valuable was to be able to step back and to see with other people’s eyes. That really helps to focus your message and to sometimes get rid of things that aren’t useful or necessary.”

By his last show for Lanvin for fall 2018, Ossendrijver was already questioning the usefulness of the show system and designer-priced clothes. “In fashion I think luxury is a strange word nowadays,” he said at the time. “It doesn’t mean anything anymore. We have to elevate how we make clothes and discover how by changing that you can change fashion.” Installed at Theory, he’s on his way.

Theory Project by Lucas Ossendrijver arrives in Theory stores and online on 7 September.