CASABLANCA SS25 during Paris Fashion Week

CASABLANCA Spring Summer 2025 during Paris Fashion Week

An unknown Los Angeles, an unexpected Los Angeles. Its underground countercultures, its shifts in personalities and its history in popular culture inspire Charaf Tajer, founder and creative director of Casablanca, to create a Spring/Summer 2025 collection in homage to his view of the City of Angels, to the people and places discovered during his visits to the city. It honors its iconography, its emblems, and its unmistakable spirit.

A crossing of cultures, a melting pot and incubator, Los Angeles has held the worlds fascination since the start of the 20th century. The collection roams through the landscape of Los Angeles today, literally and ideologically, celebrating the citys ceaseless permutations, its multitude of personalities. This is the dark side of LA, its urban communities - a vision that challenges a global stereotype of LA, part of a cultural exchange that has shaped society, a vision shared by all. But a beauty is found in its darkness and contradictions. This is a paradoxical Los Angeles - something new.

The Mexican-American Los Angelenos Lowrider culture forms a jumping-off point: a couture approach to automobiles, each is a one-off work of art, intricately painted and custom-upholstered as an expression of personal creativity and deep cultural significance. The designs decorating their chassis - brilliant shades and airbrushed gradients, geometric designs tangled with natural elements like roses - are reflected in tattoos sported by their owners and fans, celebrating Mexican heritage and identity.

Sensing a deep affinity between his own Moroccan-French working-class upbringing and the Mexican-American lived experience, Tajer and Casablanca pay homage to this essential component of LA culture. The show decor places four Lowrider cars center-stage, and the clothes reflect their love of artisanship, their pride and strength. They share a philosophy with Casablanca. A flamboyant confidence permeates every element, in wide-shouldered tailoring, embellished evening dresses and print vibrating with colour.

Riding from SoCal to Venice beach, the collection synthesizes this Mexican-American counterculture with the surf and skate scene synonymous with that locale. Freedom of body and soul is reflected in freedom of dress, a sense of the hand with crochet, knits and embrodieries and a fitted silhouette. Artworks reference skate decks and surfboards, their airbrushed graphics and sunbleached ombres connecting again with the Lowrider, unifying these disparate facets of Los Angeles. They also resemble the citys horizon, under which all life walks together.

Two heroic figures inspire: the slick sportswear and tailoring of legendary 1980s Los Angeles Lakers NBA coach Pat Riley, and the Funkadelic attire of the American musician Bootsy Collins. Again, opposites attract - these diametrically opposed approaches to dress, these two sides to Los Angelean life and aesthetics, fuse in unanticipated manners. Pat Rileys dress sense - more impeccably tailored billionaire CEO than coach - connects also with the Pachucos and Pachucas, dressed-up Mexican- American youth in sharp suiting.

The influence of Bootsy Collins keys to the psychedelic liberation and love of patterns and hues that Casablanca is known for more, is more, is more. Here, imaginary album artworks fuse with surfer and Lowrider prints in a dizzying graphic explosion that is hallmark Casablanca. Hollywood and a love of performance is central to any story of Los Angeles - these pieces demand attention, command the spotlight. Expressive of elegance, womens evening wear is a new focus, in sinuous luxurious metallic knits or sensuous printed metal-mesh.

A dynamic place, ever-transforming, one lived and loved by Charaf Tajer, Los Angeles is here transposed to Paris. Re-examined, reconsidered, and reimagined.

Runway Looks

Photos: Press CASABLANCA

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By Senior Fashion Editor 24FashionTV: Christina V Henningstad @christina_henningstad