“I love the idea of being a shirtmaker,” says Charles Sebline. “I think that being a fashion designer today is the most impossible thing—it can feel like it goes against the grain of everything I love.” He started to laugh, then went on: “I’m very happy to do just one thing.” That one thing that Charles Sebline does for his eponymous brand, Sebline, is to make some of the most sublime shirts out there—shirts which conspire to both celebrate and subvert the sartorial language of one of the most universal pieces in our wardrobes. “There’s a certain classicism to what I am doing,” he says, “but I really try to turn on its head.” In many ways, his shirts are just like him. Sebline is Anglo-French, with a British mother and a French father; fashion-schooled in London, worked for much of his career in Paris. Duality comes naturally to him, and his work is no different: Masculine and feminine, sobriety and dandyism, rigor and flourish—they all coexist harmoniously.
Soon after he launched Sebline in 2019, after a career that ranged from interning at Vivienne Westwood at the height of her mid-90s Anglomania era to working for Tom Ford at YSL—along with the master himself, Monsieur Yves Saint Laurent—his shirts acquired a cult-like status. (Today they’re sold at Kirna Zabête and Net-a-Porter.) In part, that’s down to their androgynous appeal, but it’s also due to their gorgeous fabrication—usually a compact, two-ply cotton poplin, which ages beautifully and which looks fantastic when it is simply washed and left to dry—to hell with using a steam iron. (As an avowed non-presser, this was music to my ears.) His easy and confident handling of color also comes into play: There is, of course, a classic palette of white, pale blue, navy, and black, but this fall they will be joined by both olive and a purple shade that Sebline called “papal pink.”
Those colors stood out on a recent visit to see that fall 2024 collection, which Sebline was showing out of his light and airy fourth-floor apartment a cuff-link’s throw away from the Musée Rodin on Paris’s Left Bank. What also caught the eye: A series of shirts, solid-colored, some in the declarative primary color stripes that Sebline loves so much—“visual boldness” is a phrase he returns to again and again—with a crewel-like yarn stitching in bright, contrast colors running along the edge of collars, or up and down the seams, bringing the different components of the shirts together. Others had frogging—an olde-worlde technique redolent of hussar uniforms, applied here to pieces with a casual quality that works well with that kind of intricate detailing. (Both the yarn embroidery and the frogging are relatively new for Sebline.)