Casablanca, the brand that mixes après-sport style and the luxury of Mediterranean aesthetics

After the Rain Comes the Rainbow is the title of the new SS21 collection of Casablanca, a brand founded in 2018 by Charaf Tajer, former co-founder of Pigalle and a longtime friend of Virgil Abloh, and present right from the start among the paris Fashion Week events. The collection was created by Tajer as an optimistic response to the negativity of the lockdown, which the creative director of the brand found himself forced to spend in Hawaii, after going there in March to conduct research on his fall collection. But the experience led him to pour the tropical aesthetic of the Hawaiian scenery into the range of expression of the collection – thirty-two looks that are an avalanche of flowers and palm trees, surfy iconographies and gradients of psychedelic colors set in 70s silhouettes inspired by tennis clubs and featuring two new colorways from the Casablanca x New Balance 327 that will be available from early 2021. The style of the entire collection, which remains steadfast in its melange of Moroccan and French inspirations and in its appeal to Mediterranean aesthetics, is a response to the tense and oppressive climate of 2020, as Tejar himself explained to WWD:

«The dark, doomsday style is all well and good, but when you really feel like it’s the end of the world, maybe you want something different. We’re staying positive and we hope the retailers will follow. I feel like everyone wants to get back in the saddle, so I think that’s encouraging».

The best pieces in the collection are, as always, the shirts – real signature of Casablanca – declined for this season in a more tropical version that enriches the classic color palette of the brand with more varied and lysergic colors but without radically changing that palette inspired by the colorful reinterpretation of the après-sport aesthetic that Tejar has chosen for its brand since its origins. At the time of the founding of Casablanca, the creative director had stated that he wanted to transform his brand into the "the new go-to Parisian House" and therefore, season after season, his approach to design deepens more and more. 

Curiously, the sartorial inspiration followed by this brand with a deeply French soul comes from Naples: the style of Neapolitan tailoring, lighter in construction, with unfurled shoulders, its shorter-than-normal cut and wide lapels, is remixed to the leisurewear silhouettes of the 70s whose best result, in the collection, is a cashmere safari suit that, according to the same designer , is meant to be as comfortable as a suit: "A man has to be comfortable to be elegant", were Tajer's words. The rest of the collection includes pure silk tennis suits, British quilted jackets with floral motifs and a veritable cascade of printed scarves and foulards that give the collection a decided retro mood and, along with the pearls worn by all models, a certain arogynous undertone.

Casablanca's collection for the SS21 season was presented during the digital edition of Paris Fashion Week entitled Whispers of Paris with a video-lookbook that you can see below.