André Walker Designed a Collection of Upcycled Furs for Yves Salomon

Last year, in the midst of an industry-wide move away from the use of animal skins, the Paris furrier Yves Salomon launched a project called Pieces, the concept of which is to use materials that are left over from production—to upcycle elements that would otherwise go unused. The collection was sold as a limited series, with just six to eight pieces of each style made. “We only use what we have,” Salomon explained. “It really is a re-coop system.” Now in its second iteration, André Walker has been brought in to design it.

Walker is a designer known mostly to the fashion cognoscenti—he was one of a quartet of stars New York’s Vaquera collective iconized on t-shirts in 2018, up there alongside Vivienne Westwood, Martin Margiela, and Miguel Adrover. Walker’s output over the decades has been intermittent, but his aesthetic has been consistent since he first gained notice as a 1980s teenager. His clothes twist and curve around the body in a make-do, but make-it-fabulous way, and they’re often tied or safety-pinned in place. As he put it at a preview, he’s spent a lifetime in thrift shops and customizing.

Salomon and Walker met “on the bicycle,” the latter’s preferred mode of transport whether he’s at home in New York City or in Paris, where he’s spent long periods of time over the years working with Marc Jacobs and Kim Jones. The furrier said, “André is the right person to express this recycling message. He’s on the same line.”

There’s a parka mashup of alpaca and mink, a patch-worked mink sweatshirt, and corduroy mink jumpsuit that looks almost oversized enough to fit Walker himself. Of a minidress in the black corduroy mink, he said, “my only regret is that I didn’t make a long version.” The star of the capsule offering is a fringed mink dress, very 1920s, that’s an interpretation of one of Walker’s watercolor paintings of faces.

The collection will make its debut at a cocktail party in Paris tonight. It’s Walker’s first presentation in a year and a half. He put on a show of pieces he made in collaboration with Pendelton for Spring 2018. “I like the idea of making immediate heirlooms by using what’s there,” he said.