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Kris Van Assche has always had a thing for flowers. “When I was seven, I would use the little pocket money I had to buy my mum those paper boxes that had just one orchid inside,” recalls the Belgian fashion designer, 49, best known for his tenures as artistic director of Dior Homme (2007-2018), then Berluti (2018-2021). At family dinners, his beloved grandmother would ask him to do floral arrangements for the table. “Ever since I remember, flowers have been a part of my life.”
Van Assche’s next project, made in collaboration with Belgian design brand Serax, sees him come full circle: a range of vases and bonbonnières – those decorative boxes originally designed to hold sweets. The Josephine collection, named after the designer’s grandmother, ranges from classical urn shapes to beer bottle silhouettes in porcelain, glass, marble or concrete (from €49 to €330); each vase comes with a glass tube, encased in silver, which can hold a single flower. There are also single hand-blown glass flowers (from €42) to be mixed in with your real flowers if you wish.
“My grandmother was very much about what I call old-world beauty – classical ideals that I grew up with, and that are what I stand for,” he says. “But I also wanted there to be a disturbing element.” A touch of something “off” – summed up here by the silver-plated glass flower tubes, or the vases’ unusual square base – brings the element of surprise which Van Assche feels is vital to all good design. Likewise, the inclusion of the sweet jars. “To make a bonbonnière, which is maybe the most old-fashioned thing ever, in concrete, is maybe my way of being a little bit radical.”
Van Assche joins an ever-growing list of fashion designers who have produced homeware. His inspiration there was, he says, fellow Belgian Ann Demeulemeester, who has produced various ranges with Serax. (Elsewhere, Robert Mapplethorpe, famous for his stark, unsettling photographs of flowers, is another strong influence.) “Working with Kris was a meeting of minds,” says Axel Van Den Bossche, Serax’s founder and CEO. “His vision of timeless elegance, rooted in personal memory and translated through design, resonates perfectly.”
When Van Assche first took his break from fashion, he thought: “I don’t even know who I am any more.” But a couple of years ago he compiled a book, Kris Van Assche: 55 Collections (Lannoo), which covered his entire oeuvre at Dior Homme, Berluti and his own-name label. It helped him process some 20 years on the “rollercoaster” of the fashion calendar, and to distinguish the throughline in his work. He would like to design more homeware and to return to fashion. In the meantime, his vases and bonbonnières are a continuation of the same language. “My book is called 55 Collections. Maybe this is 56.”
serax.com
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