‘I feel like I’ve always been interested in dressing. I remember my mom would tell me, “You should be dressed like this to go to school”, and I’d be like “No, no, no, this is the outfit”. It was always the pieces I felt good in, where I felt comfortable and confident,’ shares Ducruet. ‘Me and my sister would go to my mom’s wardrobe all the time to try on her dresses. Not only the dresses though, as I was pretty tomboy when I was a kid, I’d also try on all the suits and denims and motorcycle jackets. I think you can find that in my designs now, the contrast between the very feminine and the very masculine,’ she adds.
It’s no doubt her mother has been a wonderful source of inspiration for the young designer. In the 1980s, Princess Stéphanie made headlines across the world for her daring approach to her wardrobe, injecting an androgynous edge into her stately ensembles as she embarked on a successful pop music career, challenging the idea of what makes great royal style. ‘Like I said, I was always very interested in the contrast. I started working with silk a lot. Very feminine and silky, and denim. The values are very much still the same [as when I started the line], but obviously as you grow as a woman, the inspiration changes and what you want to wear also changes. You evolve as a person, so the designs evolve too.’
Support from her family has been a constant, with her mother and sister, Camille Gottlieb, routinely sat front row at the shows, but naturally, those first events were inevitably daunting. ‘My favourite highlight so far was my first runway show in Paris. It was a very personal thing because obviously my whole family came. I had designed the whole collection by myself but I hadn’t show the designs to anyone before. It was very much a reveal of what’s inside to the world’, Ducruet shares. ‘All the runway shows since then have been very emotional moments. It all goes so fast and you’re like, “God, I’ve been working on this thing for a whole year!” And in 10 minutes it’s done. You’ve internalised so much, all of these designs, the simulation and everything, and then it comes out and you’re like, “Well, that’s it!”, she laughs.
