Throughout the years, Véronique Leroy has created a distinctive repertoire that comes across as a seamless continuity from season to season. For spring, she expanded on the ideas she explored for fall, reimagining her edgy, ’80s-influenced silhouettes in unexpected fabrics: soft terry cloth, thick and bouncy honeycomb mesh, and a stretchy Gaufre material that clings to the body, adding a playful, spunky texture.
Leroy constantly seeks a kind of dissonance, whether through material, color, or proportion. Her generously cut, fluid trousers were paired with fitted stretch-velvet bathing tops or cropped taffeta blouses with sculptable puff sleeves. They can also be styled with minuscule pieces, such as terry bustiers that mold to the body’s curves. “I love the tension that comes from pairing something fitted with something oversized,” she said during the presentation of her collection in her atelier. “There’s always this deliberate contradiction; that’s what gives it its edge.” Color contrasts were handled with an equal sense of control and surprise, inspired by the soft pinks, acid greens, and confetti blues of Sylvie Roulx’s artworks—panels of recycled plastic that hang on the atelier’s walls “like discarded blankets.”
Leroy’s silhouettes are precise, she does not flaunt. She gravitates towards structure and loves to explore volumes, always looking for balance points. Each season, she looks for an anchor on the body, a place to ground the silhouette, or a volume that she can evolve and perhaps revisit over several seasons. This time, the focus was on the shoulders, but also on the waist, which she sought to elongate. “There are seasons when I work around a specific theme,” she said, “and others when I like to dig into what I’ve already started, as if the exploration were endless. When I look back through my archives, I sometimes feel like I’m doing the same thing.”
