Stephanie Danan generally doesn’t go for a lot of fuss, in her life or for her brand, but last summer’s heat wave in Paris pushed her a step further. “I kept thinking, what would it be like if we could feel like we were wearing just… nothing?” she said during a preview in her Paris showroom. “It was obvious to me that we had to go for the lightest fabrications possible.”
For spring, the Co lineup answered extreme heat with extreme lightness although not, for the most part, extreme transparency, layered together here in look 1. “A good suggestion is more interesting,” Danan quipped.
This may be new territory for the designer, but she handled it deftly by reaching for crinkled linen and jersey for suiting, silk voile for dresses, and a sprinkling of feathers on organza for evening. Several silhouettes, like a rolled-cuff tee or a navy cocoon wrap knotted at mid-thigh, let clothes stand away from the body, as they should in a heatwave, with the latter evoking an iconic silhouette of more than a century ago.
The ground zero of this lineup: a single drawstring pant, which Danan was testing over the summer and wound up wearing nonstop, from sunbaked Paris all the way to LA.
“I thought, ‘I want this with a T-shirt and I want it with a blazer, and that’s it, I don’t want to feel my clothes,’” she explained. That piece will be hitting the racks in white, powder blue and black. Other likely go-tos included breezy organza shirts that can be paired with pretty much anything, from tees to slim-cut jackets.
A fan of ample cuts, Danan here played with volume, juxtaposing buttoned-up tailoring and shrunken jackets with more generous pieces. Fans of the brand will find the classics they count on Co for: workwear, easy, somewhat boxy separates; a few no-nonsense columns or goddess dresses, the Parisienne’s classics—navy jacket, white button-down, cropped khakis, matching trench.
For evening, a standout was a bustier dress with a bubble-shaped bodice—short and white or long and black. That started as a skirt until, in a moment of clarity, the designer realized that she “doesn’t do miniskirts” and yanked it up the torso. That looked fun and timeless—a keeper for scorchers yet to come.
