Anthony Alvarez was born in the United States but raised in Paris and, as such, possesses a mix of American resourcefulness and a certain Gallic broodiness. You can see it in the spring collection for his brand, Bluemarble, which was built around the themes of board games and collecting. His research led him to the French intellectual, writer, and sociologist Roger Caillois, who studied, among other things, games, and was an avid collector of mineral stones. “I admired his approach to transformism,” Alvarez said at a presentation that took place at the home of his friend, the designer Harry Nuriev. “And really finding new meaning to these objects of the everyday.”
Alvarez likes board games because they’re a chance to connect with friends in an offline way, and so he took certain cues from them—playing card emblems, dice as a fuzzy embellishment on a sweater, the checkerboard of chess as stripes on a shirt, or the buttons on a pair of pants the are the tokens from the game Connect Four, one of his favorites. The collecting of crystals, meanwhile, came as judiciously placed stones on oversized suit jackets, in jeans with hand-embroidered beaded designs, and in hazy, striated lines in red and orange hues on a silk button-up that was actually lifted from the cross-section of an agate. “The idea for the colors of the collection was really to reflect how time passes through the stones,” Alvarez said. “Because what excites me about them is how they connect us with a deeper sense of time,” he said.
Elsewhere, the collection featured more of Alvarez’s traditional fare: utility-minded jackets and jeans, here covered in grommeted curlicues, T-shirts with crocheted pockets, and a sarong embellished with scribbles of embroidery. He hung them all up on a wall in Nuriev’s home, like a messy bedroom floor, flipped on its side. “I think a home is a perfect place for this collection,” he said. “It’s where you collect memories and also where objects become part of your life.”
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