Svitlana Bevza breezed into her temporary Paris showroom apartment, an elegant, serene space off the bustling Bastille, straight from the Eurostar looking impossibly unruffled by the hassle of Paris traffic snarls or the soaring temperatures.
For spring, the designer said she wanted to focus on three main themes: crisp lines, staples in white denoting optimism, light and energy—“because it’s the only way,” she said—and Ukrainian symbols, but handled with a subtle touch. Wheat spikelets, already the baseline for the brand’s top-selling drop earrings and supple necklaces, amped up contrast with dark-burnished elements (evoking scorched earth) sprinkled in among the gold ones. Those will be immediately recognizable for customers in the know, but also covetable for people who aren’t. A new range of small, origami-like bags with magnetic closures also played on the spikelet theme with a versatile twist: they can be worn flat for a shoulder-carry or cleverly folded into a grain-shaped bourse with a wristlet that leaves hands free to juggle other things.
Bevza’s bees, which she was able to glimpse in her Ukraine garden only briefly this spring, naturally offered up another source of inspiration, as well as the name of this collection: “Pasika,” or apiary. Honeycomb shapes—clean, crisp, variable—neatly expanded on the brand’s popular mermaid dress, slipping in as negative space on the sides of a black shift, or as geometric embroidery at the waist or placements at the bust on a slip dress. Elsewhere, the theme found a more abstract expression on an angular white jumpsuit, a funnel-neck beige windbreaker, or a white vegan leather bomber. Speaking of mermaids, a brand new swimwear line gave the house signatures an extra measure of depth.