Throughout the years, Véronique Leroy has built a distinctive repertoire that unfolds as a seamless continuum from season to season. For spring, she expanded on ideas explored for fall, reworking her sharp, ’80s-inflected silhouettes in unexpected fabrics: soft terry cloth, thick and bouncy honeycomb mesh, and a stretchy gaufré material that clings to the body while adding a playful, tactile texture.
Leroy consistently seeks a kind of dissonance, whether through materials, colors, or proportions. 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, like terry bustiers that mold to the body’s curves. “I love the tension that comes from pairing something so fitted with something oversized,” she said during the presentation of her collection at her atelier. “There’s always this intentional contradiction; that’s what gives the look its edge.” Color contrasts were handled with the same sense of control and surprise, inspired by the soft pinks, acid greens, and confetti blues of Sylvie Ruaulx’s artworks—panels of recycled plastic that hang on the atelier’s walls “like discarded blankets.”
Leroy’s silhouettes are precise, she doesn’t do le flou. She gravitates toward structure and loves exploring volume, always in search of balance points. Each season, she looks for an anchor on the body, a place to ground the silhouette, or a volume she can develop 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 prefer to keep digging into what I’ve already begun, as if the exploration were endless. When I look back through my archives, I sometimes feel as though I’ve been doing the same thing over and over again.”
