La Vie en Wildfox

Wildfox Couture did what Wildfox always did: took a mood—France, specifically France as filtered through the imagination of someone who has mostly encountered it via old films and Bardot photographs—and turned it into knitwear. The Vive La France collection lands exactly where the brand lived: somewhere between genuine nostalgia and aspirational geography, which turns out to be a comfortable place to sell oversized sweaters from. Breton stripes, sun-bleached pastels, the kind of careless romance that requires significant effort to manufacture. I always liked that Wildfox was unembarrassed about this. It was fantasy retail, and at least it knew it.