When Charaf Tajer was growing up in Belleville, the hulkingly elegant Oscar Niemeyer-designed headquarters of the French Communist Party was a mysterious local landmark. “I was looking at this building every day when I was going home from school,” Tajer recalled pre-show. “I never knew what it was.”
Returning there with Casablanca for this afternoon’s show made Tajer think about “who I am now and who I was back then,” and, he said, “it’s been a lot of progress,” shaped by “travel, art, design, architecture, everything.” Today Tajer’s sense of forward movement was projected onto Niemeyer’s home country of Brazil in a collection called “Amor e Progresso,” a rewrite of the “Ordem e Progresso” inscribed across the Brazilian flag.
The Brazilian references were broadly assembled and loudly broadcast. There were old-school soccer shirts, caps in green and yellow, a surfboard, retro lace-tied boardshorts, tropical flowers, snakeskin-effect inserts on tracksuits and leather jackets, and crochet swimwear, alongside plenty of silky shirting and scarf dressing realized in the saturated color that has always been prominent in Casablanca’s vocabulary. Tajer said he has been “obsessed with Brazil for many years.”
Spiraling crochet motifs were pieced together in halter dresses and separates; checks shifted through green, yellow and cream gradients; and knitted T-shirts, polos and shorts came washed in graduated color. Embroidered tropical orchids bloomed on a fringed bustier, as a modesty device on the closing one-shoulder gown, and elsewhere throughout the collection.
Models circled a constructed patch of Amazon to a specially mixed Brazilian soundtrack that Tajer asserted was impossible to successfully Shazam. That made decoding the music the most challenging aspect of a show that was purposefully undemanding and literal: a guided tour of Copacabana tropes through a Casablanca lens.
