With its après-sport ethos, Charaf Tajer’s Casablanca exists in a dusky, liminal space between day and night, play and partying. On top of that the designer has blurred gender lines, at least in one direction: His ideal—represented by the house muse, Sid—is representative of the new masculinity of our times. (The Casablanca woman, in contrast, is more Amazonian and less nuanced.)
Having co-owned a club in Paris called Le Pompon, Tajer must have spent a lot of time in the suspended hours between night and day. It seems safe to say the man knows how to party. Yet this season, when the prevailing mood is, to quote Mary J. Blige, “let loose and set your body free,” Tajer isn’t in a clubby mood. Chummy is more like it. His latest collection is called Masao San, after a close Japanese pal of the designer, and is, says Tajer, “an homage to friendship.”
It’s through Masao that another side of Tokyo—“the world of ping-pong and the people who used to work at Sony during the ’90s and salarymen”—opened up to Tajer. “Japan is a foundation for me in terms of iconography in general and the way [the Japanese people] think and the way they are dedicated to what they do,” he says. The season’s bags are puckish takes on bento boxes.
The most obvious influence on the collection is, however, the Memphis movement that came out of Milan in the 1980s. The bright colors and cartoonish shapes of Memphis are cleverly and, for the most part, subtly translated by Tajer into a pastel-to-bright palette and curvilinear cuts. A wavy lapel on a dress jacket and an undulating hem on what Tajer describes as a “strict, Fisher-Price” suit are unexpectedly chic, in contrast to a more literal shell-shaped halter top and miniskirt.
On a deeper level, Tajer’s celebration of Memphis is a celebration of Karl Lagerfeld, the movement’s greatest collector and the man Casablanca’s ambitious creative director considers to be the father of modern fashion. “The exercise that Lagerfeld did with Chanel is definitely quite surrealistic when you think about it,” says Tajer. “He took one of the oldest houses of fashion and turned it into one of the most Pop and still-relevant brands in the world. He had this panache that we want to put in Casablanca as well—this sort of freedom to not take itself seriously. And [Lagerfeld] always talked back to the child that he used to be, and I think this is something that is very, very important. You have to remember who you were when you were more innocent, in a way, and I think this is where his genius comes from.”
The strength of Casablanca is its focus not on partying but play—and not only in the sense of sport. A fête is limited to time and place. A sense of play, in contrast, is a state of mind—and the essence of youth, fashion’s grail.
