Hyères Festival 2025 honours Lucas Emilio Brunner

The 40th International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Accessories in Hyères concluded on Saturday with an awards ceremony at Villa Noailles that crowned Swiss-Chilean designer Lucas Emilio Brunner.

Despite a severe budget crisis, the event — made possible by the steadfast support of public institutions and private partners — proved a success. Even in a streamlined three-day format, it drew large crowds as well as industry professionals.

“It was a great opportunity to put young creativity back at centre stage. All the human resources directors from the major fashion houses were there,” enthused Pascale Mussard, president of the Villa Noailles art centre, which oversees the event.

The fashion competition set a particularly high bar, with accomplished, finely executed collections — many ready for market — underpinned by coherent storytelling. This year, young designers were especially engaged with themes of war and questions around masculinity and femininity. Arguably, a touch of madness was missing, with numerous over-familiar proposals and silhouettes that seemed to cast us back into the past, replete with frills and gathers. With a few exceptions, menswear silhouettes proved markedly more creative.

Brunner’s universe exemplified this, earning him the Fashion Jury Grand Prix. The 26-year-old Swiss designer of Chilean origin, who graduated in 2022 from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre in Brussels, explored “the dissection of balloons and a study of instrument stands to create an identifiable menswear wardrobe, inspired by the Ivy League style of the 1960s.”

He deconstructs the party balloon and all its components, ingeniously adapting principles derived from his in-depth research to his garments. The result: an inventive, playful collection brimming with fresh ideas.

He opened with a deliberately fragile “image” look: a tartan jacket fashioned from a multitude of small inflated balloons. He then reprised their form, padding a host of mini-tubes in white-and-blue shirt-striped poplin with wadding. Next, he riffed on the balloon knot, using it to fasten a blue latex trench coat at the front, a pair of trousers at the side, or a draped leather top tied, balloon-style, over one shoulder.

The same knot replaced the ribbon at the back of an oval, balloon-shaped beret. Finally, a T-shirt covered in shaggy fringing was made from a series of deflated balloons. With his pop-inflected pieces, his innovative spirit and this prestigious award, the young designer — who has worked with Germanier, Palomo Spain and Maison Margiela, and who lives and works in Geneva — is clearly destined for success.

Outerwear and leather

The competition also recognised French designer Adrien Michel (28) in the Fashion category, awarding him the “le19M Métiers d’art” prize, introduced by Chanel in 2019. Hailing from the Vosges mountains, the designer, also a graduate of La Cambre, developed a collection at the intersection of “technical mountain sportswear and a contemporary men’s wardrobe”, proposing new constructions and proportions with hybrid outerwear bridging trench coat and down jacket, and two-in-one lumberjack shirts.

The “L’Atelier des Matières” prize — the other award promoted by Chanel, a major partner of the festival — went to Layla Al Tawaya (24), of Polish and Palestinian origin, who recently graduated from Parsons Paris, where she is based and works. She stood out for her craftsmanship, working leather like lace in a unisex menswear collection that blends two opposing universes: the masculinity of the perfecto and the femininity of the tutu, with a cascade of tulle ruffles, pleats, gathers, large jabots, and smocked or zipped cuffs for a baroque, rococo wardrobe.

Lebanese designer Youssef Zogheib (23), who also studied at Parsons Paris, won the Hyères Public Prize with a unisex collection inspired “by soldiers who cross-dressed during the Second World War.”

His well-cut pieces — such as long, flared military coats that unfurled into flowing, floating volumes — won over both the public and professionals.

Among the competition’s new features was the Supima Prize. The American association responsible for promoting high-end cotton grown mainly in the U.S., which has supported the Hyères Festival for eight years, introduced its own award this year, offering the winner a fabric allocation to produce their collection. Swiss designer Noah Almonte (29) took the prize with graphic, clean-lined proposals ranging from a large gingham-check dress à la Balenciaga to wide-brimmed hats and bolero jackets for ladylike chic looks.

American visibility

The icing on the cake is that on November 5, Supima will fly its winner and the nine other finalists in the fashion category to New York, along with Hugo Lucchino, the new general manager of Villa Noailles, to attend its Supima Design Lab competition, giving international exposure to the Hyères event and its creative talents.

On the accessories side, the jury’s Grand Prix went to 28-year-old Frenchman Amaury Darras for his remarkable woodworking skill. Originally from Châteauneuf-sur-Loire in the Loiret region, he trained at the École Boulle in Paris. After eight years as a cabinetmaker in Orléans, he moved to Marseille, where in 2023 he opened the Atelier Vandael with 11 other visual artists.

“I’ve been working on the human body for three years, using wood and wearable sculptures. I’ve invented my own three-dimensional marquetry technique,” he explained as he showed FashionNetwork.com his work.

These include a corset, clogs and a bag, crafted from various woods such as olive, Rio rosewood and walnut burl. For her part, the highly talented Luisa Olivera (27), from San Pedro Sula in Honduras, who came to France in 2017 to study at the IFM and the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, was awarded the Hermès Accessories Prize, demonstrating her versatility. She captivated the public with incredibly light modular jewellery in the shape of fabric flowers with a lustrous finish, which open and close.

French designer Alyssa Cartaut (24), a graduate of the École Duperré and holder of a master’s degree from La Cambre, won the Public Prize for a highly inventive shoe collection developed around the cushion theme, creating super-soft lambskin mules equipped with mini bolsters and other cushions, which she describes as “foot rooms”. Pieces that make you want to put them on right away.

For photography, the jury awarded the 7L Grand Prize to French photographer Noémie Ninot and a special mention to her compatriot Julie Joubert. Spanish-Moroccan Gabriel Mrabi took the American Vintage prize.