Parisian-born Faustine Steinmetz set her trademark reworked denim in motion for spring summer 2018 with her first runway show at London Fashion Week. Steinmetz didn’t limit herself to jeans this time. Daily staples such as the t-shirt, trench coat, slip dress, and denim had been hacked at, sliced up and torn apart.

Up until now, Faustine Steinmetz has used art exhibit style presentations to showcase her work. ‘I always said I would never ever do a catwalk because I didn’t like it being about the glamour and the girls and beauty, but in the end, I was really freed by taking off everything around the clothes and just working on my materials’ Steinmetz said backstage of her decision. There’s also focus on models, reflecting Steinmetz’s personality-driven casting process. ‘We really wanted to have real people. I’ve never really been into models, I think nowadays you just want to do some work that feels real and models can take that off very easily, just by being very exceptional and very tall and people you wouldn’t ever see in real life. As she surmised: We wanted to find a different sort of beauty. Real people’.

Steinmetz’s approach to the collection which featured distressed denim, faux Fendi bags, painterly acyclic style textures and shredded detailing was essentialistic. She wanted to take ten pieces of clothing everyone knows and has had in their wardrobe at some point and re-do, deconstruct and reconstruct.