BRYCE AIME INTERVIEW
YOU MAY NOT HAVE HEARD OF BRYCE AIME, BUT YOU SOON WILL. THE DESIGNER BEHIND RIHANNA’S SPIKY-SHOULDERED ‘HARD’ GET-UP CHATS TO AGENT2’S AMY FALLON ABOUT THE LADY HERSELF, AND WHY GREEN TEA AND FASHION ARE ‘THE SAME’…
Bryce Aime tells me to throw out the Starbucks hot chocolate I’ve been drinking on the tube before we walk into Le Pain Quotidien at Notting Hill Gate.“I’ll get you another one,” he insists.
It’s not just grey today in London, it’s bucketing down. I’m also ten minutes late. Aime only lives around the corner so there are no dramas. But I get the impression that even if he lived on the other side of town, he wouldn’t have made a big fuss. As far as rising designers and accessibility go, he’s pretty laid back, doing his own calls and emails. In fact it was Aime who insisted on having a face-to-face interview. Then again the 2005 Central Saint Martins (CSM) graduate is known to serve customers himself at his shop on Walton Street in Chelsea.
“I’m sure there are some designers who do this, who push the passion to that point of actually coming down to the shop from time to time,” he says, shrugging his shoulders as his green tea arrives.“It’s important for you to see this in your own eyes because when you design, when you create a product, you are hoping it will sell.
“You have to understand that process, so when you design something you have to almost imagine the clothes hanging on the shop floor and how to they look, how are they perceived.
“Then at some point you start to realise that you should be doing this instead of that and this is how you get better in especially in terms of sales.”
Ah yes, sales. When the store first opened in November last year, things were “to be perfectly frank, a bit difficult at the beginning” Aime admits.
“It wasn’t a great time and it was hard as a newcomer,” he says.“But we had this opportunity, this great space, so we kind of jumped into it. After February things started to really pick up and we had some great sales over the summer.”
Of course Aime, 31, who hails from the 17th district of Paris, is in good company. But having your boutique in the same vicinity as Jean Paul Gaultier, Jasper Conran and Joseph also means competition.
“It’s an interesting mix but I must say also say as it’s an upper-class area, it’s (the fashion) very neat. It’s very clean, it’s very elegant,” says Aime of the West London set. “They are classic in the way they dress up. They’re never going to be very eccentric, very individual. It’s only about YSL and Chanel.
“But for other designers such as me – and there’s more than me, there’s a hundred of us – it’s a little bit difficult for us to reach our people basically.”
By “our people” he is referring to east London, where the locals are a “little bit more trendy but have less money”. Aime has just moved his office there. To Old Street, to be more precise.
Despite being so hands-on in some areas he describes his working quarters as resembling an “architect’s office”.
“I have very few rolls of fabric. We are not a factory!” insists the designer, who says he eventually wants to be stocked in the world’s leading department stores, but will first spend a few seasons perfecting his product and cementing its identity in the market.
Aime’s clothes are made in the Loiret in north-central France, where Balenciaga is also produced (an inspiration of Aime’s, along with fellow Francophone Thierry Mugler).
He is currently working on his LFW collection, Asiarama. The inspirations were his Japanese assistant Takashi, the Beijing opera – “it’s amazing” – and the Japanese theatre play Kabuki.
“I really like this region, China, Japan, Thailand,” says Aime, whose trader wife Xiaohui has been based in Beijing but is back in Britain permanently soon. “I think you either hate it or love it.I wanted to do something like this two or three seasons ago but I wasn’t ready as I needed to understand a few things culturally.
“For me it’s important to understand the people. They kind of inspired me to do something, so I had to make a trip there.”
His A/W 10 collection, Egyptology, also appeared to have been based around a particular culture. Models sported structured body con dresses from the range, with big sweatbands around their head transforming them into “mummies”.
Aime has however actually never been to Egypt, will “probably never go there”, and says he wouldn’t base an entire collection around one civilization.
“Generally speaking, it’s not about culture all the time. It just happened like that,” he reveals.“When you start being too rich, especially culturally speaking, you have to be careful because we’re in England, we’re in Europe. We have our own interpretations of things and clichés.
“And frankly I don’t think we’re prepared to associate clothes of everyday wear with something that’s quite strong, culturally speaking.
“You can have one or two pieces here or there, but to do a full collection like that… I cannot risk myself too much.”
His next offering – currently “20 per cent there” – will be “a complete different thing”, he promises.“The title is done, the colour is done, the silhouette we need to define better because it’s just sketched here and there,” is all Aime will say.
As usual it has been created with only has one female in mind: his “fictional woman”.
“It’s more the way she talks, she way she walks, the way she behaves, what she says,” describes Aime, who will only show in Paris again next season.
“I can’t imagine really it depends on your mood. But she’s quite strong generally speaking. She’s not girly. There’s a thin line between masculinity and femininity. I think that she’s like that.”
I must look a bit bewildered, because he elaborates, “We don’t want 100 per cent woman. She doesn’t wear the clothes to be somebody else. The clothes are wearing her. It’s a personality… We don’t transform her every season we just carry on.”
Speaking of the clothes wearing his “fictional woman”, what does he think of stars such as Rihanna wearing his own creations? In her video clip for 2009 single Hard, the singer donned a low cut, lethal-looking “couture-military” creation with spiked sleeves, as she brandished an apparent machine gun.
“I think it’s important. Everyone in the industry will tell you this and the one who says otherwise is a liar. We need, anybody needs, a little bit of an endorsement and nowhere more than fashion because fashion is relying on an image,” Aime says.
“Unfortunately – I hate to say this – the first thing you see is the image. And if you like the image you’re pretty convinced. Anything goes from there. If that person is well perceived or it’s a big A-lister wearing your stuff it’s a tremendous bonus. But it’s a big spectrum and the celebrity thing is only one part…”
For someone now dressing the rich and famous, Aime says it’s actually “really an accident” that he ended up in fashion. He never drew when he was young and was “absolutely rubbish at school”, only caring about philosophy, literature and history.
“I never dressed my dolls. I never wore makeup or played with my Mum’s stuff,” he recalls.“I used to build cities made of cardboard, toilet paper. I used to like to use my hands.”
It was the desire to learn English that brought him to Britain in the summer of 1998 when he was 19. The decision didn’t go down too well with his parents, both doctors. “But I think I had to go away,” Aime says. “I needed some reality checks. I wasn’t a bad kid but I was in my own world.”
After waiting tables and even hitting the decks in some “really shit places that don’t even exist today”, he concluded- while working a double shift in a restaurant- that he had no direction and needed a return to study.
Law and science were not for him. So he applied to do evening classes in fine arts at CSM. Aime was unaware then of the esteemed reputation that the college had.
He decided to stick with fashion, beginning portfolio classes to prepare himself for interviews. “I stuck with fashion and overnight I went from very little…” Aime trails off.
Despite the rag trade being a hard business, he says that it is at least forgiving. And never dull. “The reward is this: you’re allowed to make some mistakes. Every season your try your luck and you try and be consistent also to your work and your beliefs. You’ve got to be prepared to take criticism because as I said it’s all about images and it’s very subjective,” he explains.
“Not everybody likes green tea. Fashion is the same. I quite like that and I like the competition, for most. “There is a competition but it’s not really an in-your-face competition. It’s more about the tension, the adrenaline, the stress inside and out of your studio, the deadline.
“And then it comes again – but in a different manner, in different people, in a different season. It’s a cycle. You can’t get bored.”
And bored is the very last thing you could be when Bryce Aime is around.
Words Amy Fallon Images Andres Reynaga Hair and make-up Justin Williams
