July 14, 2023 |
It’s one size fits all, but not the prejudicial kind. Ester Manas is the Brussels-based burgeoning brand kicking “curve-washing” to the curb. Helmed by partners in work, love and life – Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre – under Manas’ name the creative couple have built a brand worth buying into. Their calling card? Inclusive creations that adapt to the wearer.
Just last week, the design duo took home €100 000 as part of the ANDAM Award’s Special Prize, alongside Duran Lantik and grand prize winner Louis-Gabriel Nouchi. As part of the award, the design duo will also receive a year of mentorship from Riccardo Bellini, president and CEO of Chloé, who will advise on their creative, corporate and commercial development. It’d be remiss not to mention though, that they’ve also been spotlighted by the prestigious H&M Design Award, the Hyères Festival and the LVMH Prize. Impressive. But that all pales in comparison to what’s next. Because at the end of August, the pair are getting married.
Manas is making her own dress, and the pair are designing Delepierre’s look too – not to mention the entire wedding party. At first, they thought, “Okay, it’s going to be super easy because we build a fashion show every six months, so we know how to do that kind of stuff,” Delepierre recalls, before laughing, “but, we do not know how to do a wedding. It’s really crazy – we spent one week on the seating plan!”
“It’s like a fashion show!” both agree, completing each other’s sentences as they do repeatedly throughout or conversation. For the catwalk, they work with a PR team on the seating and invitation send-outs, but ‘The Big Day’ has proved to be a whole new kind of challenge. “We have the most cliché fights, like about the fabric for the table,” says Delepierre. “It’s like in the movies,” Manas agrees.
In dressing their wedding party though, the couple realised that “for the first time it was not about the body and the subject”. There is no size requirement for a wedding – people come as they are, diverse and varied – so the Ester Manas designers embraced this as an example of true inclusivity. “Families have a lot of different bodies,” Delepierre starts, “so we didn’t need an excuse to welcome everybody because it was already the fact.” For those that’ll be in attendance, it’ll be like looking up at a fashion fantasy full of beautiful, diverse figures revelling in lacy bliss. “It’s showcasing the Ester Manas DNA,” Manas relays, “so it’s really personal to us.”
Photography by Oriane Verstraeten
Their impending wedding actually served as inspiration for their AW23 collection, a playfully feminine line-up aptly named For Better Or For Worse. “It’s the first time we really used personal stuff to help design a collection,” Delepierre reflects, “and that was quite a challenge because we don’t like doing that that much.” Using their own nuptials as the starting point, the duo wanted to design a “dreamy”, fantasy ceremony. “We chose to do it in a super intense way because obviously our real wedding won’t look like that,” he continues. “There were a lot of inside jokes because we were thinking about the characters you can find at a wedding – the drunk best friend, the grandma, the mum – and we thought, ‘Oh, we would love to dress them’. Then we started the design process.”
Founding the brand in 2019, the designers met 11 years ago while studying at La Cambre, Brussels’ renowned visual arts school, which Manas punctuated with apprenticeships at fashion houses like Annemie Verbeke, Balenciaga, Rabanne and Acne Studios. Delepierre was knee-deep in his graphic design universe at the time and Manas was cutting her teeth on the fashion design course, but they found a way to work together.
When it came time for Manas to begin conceptualising her graduate collection, she asked herself for the first time, why, for five years at La Cambre, she hadn’t had a chance to work with bigger bodies and instead, was “always stuck with skinny models”. From then on, inclusivity and size representation became her ambition.
Photography by Yoann et Marco
“It really comes from when we realised Ester was not the only one having an issue with the way fashion was displaying a woman’s body,” Delepierre says. Manas joins in, “At the beginning, it was really selfish and it was for myself because I was mad and frustrated. It was for my creativity, for my dream.” At a size 44-46 – about a UK 16/18 – finding garb that fit her figure correctly was a struggle for Manas. In her bid to channel those frustrations into a solution, she soon to develop new construction techniques that would allow for wider sizing and more malleability. “When we did the first collection, everyone was like, ‘Okay, this is really cool, you should move forward with this,'” Delepierre recalls. “It was super emotional to have this feedback from models, friends and customers at the end.” There is a massive market out there for women with bigger bodies looking to score something stylish. “It’s not only about image, it’s about what you can find in a shop, it’s about dressing everyone,” Manas declares.
Ester Manas has made a commitment to being inclusive when fashion still hasn’t made a whole lot of progress in that respect. We’re seeing more curve models on the runway, but progress is slow. “It’s like, one step forward and two steps back. A few years ago, the representation was there, but fashion month a few months back was a nightmare, especially in Paris, but also in Milan and New York. Only London was moving forward because of three young brands,” says Manas. “When the press can count the curvy girls, it’s not good news,” Delepierre adds.
The pair usually work with a one-size-fits-all framework, sometimes including two for certain products, and more rarely, your typical S, M, L lineup. “It’s a good solution because stores have to buy that one size,” Manas explains. “The brand has to play the game, but the stores also have to. It’s a joint effort, really.”
Photography by Hadrien Chevalier, Oriane Verstraeten and Nicolas Kuttler
Ester Manas’ collections themselves are predominantly made up of diaphanous, second-skin dresses – beautifully spliced and flesh-baring. The pair also specialise in sinuous bra tops, big, bouncy ruffles, ruched details and lacy and slinky pencil or micro-mini skirts underpinning décolletage or hip-flashing cut-outs. Blouses and gowns expand, thanks to a system of ruffles, to fit all silhouettes, accentuating the sensual curves of a woman’s body and driving home the firm belief that fashion is for all.
Textiles play a crucial role in the brand’s aesthetic which often uses clever ruching techniques, stretch, ribbed jersey, smocking and cutouts to create its sexy, elevated, see-through silhouettes. “We spend a lot of time in warehouses in the south and north of Paris to find deadstock fabrics,” Manas explains, “then mixing the fabrics we found together because it’s the only way we want to create collections.” The brand’s AW23 collection, for example, was manufactured using 90 percent deadstock. Manas goes on to explain that 80 percent of the materials they use offer some kind of elastication, but that she prefers to play with ruching in order to “welcome a lot of aspects of size”.
“It’s not about just draping on the mannequin,” she says. “It’s really about beauty, but also about maths. We work almost like scientists [when we’re] designing products.”
Photography by Hadrien Chevalier
It’ll only be a matter of weeks after the pair recite their vows before they’re to deliver another gauzy collection. This one will be during Paris Fashion Week in September. Until then, the couple will continue to keep on fighting for size inclusivity. “The Manas girl was not invited into the fashion world before,” Delepierre says, “we have so much to say about her and her body. It’s really exciting.”
Photography courtesy of Ester Manas.
Photography by Nicolas Kuttler
