In corporate culture (at least of yore) the first three months of employment is probationary. At Filippa K, Saint Laurent alum Liisa Kessler’s first three collections were the equivalent of corporate months, but the designer has clearly eased into her position and found her footing with her new collection for fall 2024, which feels confident and less self-conscious than those that preceded it.
The current craze for all things office and Working Girl dovetails beautifully with the brand heritage—founded in 1993 Filippa K created soft suiting for women climbing the corporate ladder—and with Kessler’s own strength as a tailor. The first look—an icy gray oversize alpaca-wool blazer worn with the brand’s best selling merino-knit cardigan worn as a shirt, and pants with a twisted seam that opens into a vent—set the tone and showed that the designer means business. The jacket has an ’80s-style width, yet, as Kessler explained, she focused on “a super soft buildup in the shoulders… that really gives you the movement and the softness.” Some of the men’s suiting is similarly constructed; a shearling jacket for him, in two tones of brown, features the inverted triangle shape associated with the Me Decade.
Like many designers, Kessler is currently fascinated with the transition between the ’80s and the ’90s, a time when Gordon Gekko gradually gave way to grunge. She landed on that through Office, a 2002 book by Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk, who, in the ’90s shot empty office spaces (many built in the boom ’80s) in New York, Tokyo, and Stockholm. The palette was pulled from its pages and the photos’ shiny desks and piled carpets encouraged texture play. A cold shoulder top and midi skirt, for example, come in a cozy fleece-like material.
There’s been lots of post-pandemic talk about what to do with now unoccupied corporate real estate, so it’s interesting to see Kessler engage with the topic via a different entryway. “For me, it’s always interesting how these physical spaces interact with the humans that are moving in there,” she said. “I was thinking a lot about how the Filippa K woman and man inject these spaces with their energy, with the brand’s signature effortlessness and ease, and the Scandinavian freshness and this youthfulness.”
Here a pinstripe button-down was paired with darker pinstripe pants, a look that was sharp, yet approachable. White turtlenecks under tailoring kept things more casual, and the classic briefcase was edited into a small east-west bag.
For after-hours there are washed denim pieces featuring a three-button detail pulled from the archive. Work life has changed, but the desire to work a ’fit rages on. Filippa K’s collection keeps the fire burning.
