Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear Spotlight - Alexandre Matthieu Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear Collection on Style.com: Runway Review

PARIS, October 13, 2000 – Since winning the competition at the prestigious Hyères Fashion Festival in 1999, the Parisian duo of Alexandre Morgado, 25, and Matthieu Bureau, 26, have caused quite a stir with their star-burst colors, circus characters and cartoon-like appliqués. “Our work references everything from beauty contests to Las Vegas games, from Hollywood starlets to Parisian cabaret,” says Morgado. “We bring new fashion elements to a vocabulary of clichés.”

Indeed they do. Alexandre Matthieu’s sharp-shouldered blazers with bright stripes and asymmetric lapels, double-layered dresses with glamour-girl prints, and graphic snap-side tanks have already been picked up by forward-thinking boutiques such as Brown’s, Colette, and Zao. Björk wore their now-famous black-and-pink striped dress to the Cannes Film Festival, generating instant media frenzy. The duo went on to receive an important grant from the French ministry of culture and, more recently, financial sponsorship from LVMH.

With only one formal collection under their belts, it already seems certain that there’s a bright future ahead for Morgado and Bureau. “We want to offer people a positive and optimistic view of fashion,” they say. “We design for women who believe in fairy tales.”

– By Armand Limnander

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