{"id":10251,"date":"2024-06-10T08:44:24","date_gmt":"2024-06-10T08:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=10251"},"modified":"2024-06-10T08:44:25","modified_gmt":"2024-06-10T08:44:25","slug":"second-hand-rose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=10251","title":{"rendered":"Second-hand Rose"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cassandra Lemeilleur\/Mathieu Pattier, Ouest France<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Cassandra Lemeilleur is a fashion rebel after my own heart. Brought up on charity shop clothes, she had no reason to move on from them when she went to study at a fashion college in Bordeaux. But she hated it: there was absolutely no focus on self-expression. And her tutors were aghast at her passion for second-hand clothes \u2013 they told her it was dirty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than be forced onto the mould of Paris fashion, she went into doing costumes for film and television, though the contemporary comedies she worked on didn\u2019t provide quite the same scope for festivals of lace and satin as in, say, a Marie Antoinette<\/em> or Tous les Matins du Monde.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her big break came when she returned to her home town of Granville, on the Normandy coast, in 2014. She was offered the opportunity to do a catwalk show as part of the Festival Electro des Travers\u00e9es music event. She hit the charity shops to create her collection, and though she didn\u2019t quite realise it at the time, her USP was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Present at that show was Granville\u2019s Director of Senior Services, Christophe Lamoureux, and he had a brainwave: he commissioned her to mount a catwalk show featuring the residents of the town\u2019s old people\u2019s homes. One month later the rookie models took to the runway. This cemented Lemeilleur\u2019s ambitions: \u2018It was then that I understood what I wanted to do: to go beyond the garment and see the person inside.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her label Amour Collective was launched in 2018, showcasing recycled garments and fabrics. Half of the models in the catwalk show were over 60.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s clear that the process of creating the collection was as important as the end result: \u2018Fittings are a time for exchanging confidences. I met widows and widowers, women who had been cheated on, victims of incest\u2026 \u2018 In front of the mirror, people became reacquainted with themselves. \u2018My parents always had white hair; I\u2019m not the least bit afraid of ageing.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amour Collective went from strength to strength, and three years later Lemeilleur mounted a show, I Will Make Your Dreams Blossom<\/em>, in the gardens of the family home of local lad Christian Dior. Not that she was intimidated, or anything: \u2018As far as most people In Granville are concerned, he\u2019s just always felt like one of the family.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year she put on a show at Mont St Michel, with two hundred models and five hundred volunteers drawn from six coastal towns in the area. On the catwalk it was open house: \u2018Big tough guys, little slips of girls, young, old, wrinkly, ill \u2013 we made up the fashion as we went along.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is there a signature Amour Collective style? Not at all. \u2018Le beaut\u00e9 n\u2019est pas dans le sexy,\u2019 declares Lemeilleur in an aphorism that needs no translation. \u2018It\u2019s in the energy you give off, the lightness, the insouciance.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wanted to go beyond the garment and see the person inside<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":10252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,63,205,55],"tags":[559,560],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10251"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10251"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10261,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10251\/revisions\/10261"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}