The Patagonian source code that Marcelo Burlon brought from the “hippy village” where he was born has served him extremely well, and continues to drive the bread-and-butter sales of his brand. His recent winged-shoulder jersey for Naples’s fiercely-followed football team was a record-breaking sell out, and the black and white textile pattern you can see in this lookbook has been in his collections since day one.
But the Burlon of 2021 is very different from the hungry, party-loving kid who built that brand in the first place. It proved the starting point for his co-founding of the New Guards Group, and his work supporting Virgil Abloh in the post-Pyrex establishment of Off-White, both of which bore spectacular financial fruit. These days Burlon is happily in situ at his house in Ibiza with his primary loves, building an art collection, still focusing on County, but also working out how to widen his aperture and give back—a process that (no spoilers allowed) should prove significant later this year.
In the meantime, this Château de Franconville collection pushed many of those perennial County buttons and delivered some fresh new takes. The house logo was integrated into hand-crocheted wraps, pants, vests and shorts. The handsome denim pieces were all made from sustainable cotton. Burlon’s last-season star maps, edged with paisley seeds, were delivered this time around in multicolored patchworks: especially covetable was the collarless kimono coat. The abstract colored waves on suiting were inspired by the psychedelic pioneer Verner Panton’s mind-melting design radicalism. Burlon said that his appetite for expressing County is still sharp, but added that there are now competing impulses too: these cannot be given away now, but once revealed should prove just as enduring as the iconography upon which Burlon has built his richly deserved rise.
