For several years now, Mattiussi has featured women on his menswear runway—Caroline de Maigret was the first—wearing sized-down versions of his masculine collection pieces. He reckons 1 in 4 of his customers are female—many of them, of course, buying for men. And a few years ago the Paris department Le Bon Marché began semi-surreptitiously stocking smaller size Ami pieces on its womenswear floor.
At last Mattiussi has taken the hint. Today sees the launch of Ami’s first-ever dedicatedly feminine offering, a tightly curated capsule collection created exclusively with 24Sevres.com, the LVMH-backed digital arm of Le Bon Marché. For this Ami habitué, the star pieces are the wool charcoal suit jacket and matching pants, cut specifically for women at last, as well pretty much all the outerwear.
Speaking over the phone from Paris, where he is preparing to show the label’s first pre-collection in Milan soonish, Mattiussi said: “I’m not making a full womenswear collection—not yet, anyway. But there are a lot of women who work in the studio who love to wear Ami and the number of female customers is increasing, too, especially thanks to the trend for oversize. Le Bon Marché has been stocking our smaller sizes in the department for a while now, so when they started 24Sevres.com and said do you want to do a real womenswear capsule, I thought, Why not?”
According to Mattiussi, he asked those Ami-wearing women in his studio which pieces they would love most to see translated to a gender-specific cut and went from there. He was also sure to export a white-on-red polka-dot shirt that featured in last June’s menswear show because, “I’ve noticed so many girls here are wearing polka dots as they hang out drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes on the terrace.”
As I’ve urged so many others, why not try making friends with Ami? My hunch is that you’ll end up loving it.
