FRAGMENTED MEMORIES AND AN IMAGINATIVE PARIS WITH VAUTRAIT SS25
Can you feel nostalgic for a memory you never had? Long for a place you’ve never lived in? Yonathan Carmel, creative director of Vautrait, sought to find out. Feeling a pull to Paris and yearning for its experiences, Carmel’s Spring/Summer’25 collection is a ballad for the city. It’s not based on actual material adventures, but instead on splintered memories, fragments of imagination. Through its garments, Vautrait conjures a Parisian chic aesthetic — something perhaps forgotten, but certainly not lost.
Based on a profound sense of nostalgia, Carmel’s collection comments on today’s day and age where everything is consumed by sameness; where backdrop and clothing hold no apparent connection anymore. But Paris is fundamental to his work here. A direct response to the dissolution of scenery, Vautrait SS25 returns to a time where fashion was not a commodity, but a craft grounded in a city’s entire being.
Casual garments are reimagined with a sense of surreal sophistication. The designs balance the thread of what is, what was, and what could have been. In this sense, the looks evoke a Paris that could only exist in the imagination of a designer. The city feels both far and distant, yet close and deeply personal. Fabrics are flowing and silhouettes dabble in a similar soft tailoring. In a way, the collection gushes in a breath of fresh air: that of a past that never was and of a future that has yet to come.
That playful dynamic between past and future also means that nothing is quite screwed into the present. Almost as if stuck in a liminal space, the collection offers garments that are thoughtful and surreal, but not of the now. Details are immaculate, the tailoring is extensive, and the mixture between oversized and elegant, leisure and grace, is a sincere decision. Carmel stuck close to his heart for Vautrait’s SS25 collection. Cherry-picking memories somewhere deep beneath the waves of his brain and infusing it with an imaginative Parisian chic, the collection is a beautiful warping of space and time.
