In the 24 months since Pauline Dujancourt graduated with a Master’s degree in fashion knitwear from Central Saint Martins, her career has sky-rocketed. Fresh out of university, she secured international stockists big and small – including five global Dover Street Market stores.
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In April 2024, she was named one of the eight finalists of the prestigious LVMH Prize (past winners include Nensi Dojaka, Grace Wales Bonner and S.S. Daley), a significant milestone she didn’t expect to hit so soon. She’s currently preparing to showcase her collection to the Prize Jury at the final in Paris this September. ‘I’m so grateful that happened. Suddenly, I went from being a tiny brand in my tiny space to having so many contacts and so much exposure,’ the London-based French designer tells me from her Hackney studio.
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For Dujancourt – who did stints at Simone Rocha and Rejina Pyo before starting her own label – making clothes isn’t just about creating beautiful pieces: it’s about the preservation of traditional knitting and crocheting techniques and, in many ways, modernising them. ‘I wasn’t drawn to knitwear in the beginning because I thought it was really dated,’ she explains. Her goal is to challenge the perception of crafts such as crochet by creating sensual, dainty garments that follow the natural curves of a woman’s body.
Her clothes, which are handmade by women in Peru, lie somewhere between the ethereal and the mystical. There is a certain romance to the way Dujancourt mixes materials – you can often find crochet as fine as a gold chain placed delicately over a mesh strip or attached to the softest Alpaca wool vest. It can take a week to create some of the intricately crocheted pieces, she says.
There are few places where Dujancourt doesn’t knit – she jokes that you’ll always find two knitting needles and some yarn tucked away in her bag. Her key influences are Noir Kei Ninomiya, a Japanese label that falls under the Comme des Garçons umbrella, and Phoebe English, where she did her first internship 10 years ago in London. Another important source of inspiration is more unexpected: ‘I can spend hours on YouTube watching Turkish women who make crochet videos [in a language] I can’t understand,’ she says, laughing. ‘I copy their gestures quite a lot and look at the stitching. I love discovering these grandmothers who have their own YouTube channels.’
Next spring, Dujancourt plans to shoot a documentary about the community of 30 hand-knitters and crocheters she works with in Lima, as well as the artisans based in the UK and France. ‘I love the proximity: I know them all by name. I know who works on crochet and who likes certain types of yarn.’ That’s not something every designer can say, but it’s the human side of the business that Dujancourt wants to bring into the spotlight. People rarely have insight into the fashion-production process, she says, and showcasing the workers who play a pivotal role in bringing the brand to life is highly important to her.
‘It is a way for us to put these women at the forefront,’ she says. ‘It’s keeping the tradition alive.’
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