Victor Brial is a gentle soul: hardworking and precise, he’s a Fashion Design student whose passion for knitwear, his initiative, and creative dedication meant that last year he won a scholarship with Shima Seiki, a world leader in flat knitting machinery.
The scholarship consists of an exclusive four-week program at the company’s Segrate headquarters, near Milan. The fully funded course, covering accommodation and learning materials, provides hands-on training with industry experts and the chance to develop advanced technical skills in knitwear, and presents not only valuable professional experience but also wonderful networking opportunities that could serve the future career of prospective designers.
Brial is from Réunion, a French department in the Indian Ocean, known for its volcanic terrain and beautiful beaches. Currently in his final year of the Undergraduate in Fashion Design course at Polimoda, throughout his collections from the past years, his identity as an islander is ever-present.
His final-year collection, The Collector, is inspired by a travelling man, an explorer who ends up on the island with the goal of wanting to fully immerse himself. He collects small objects, experiences, textures, and colors, incorporating them into how he dresses. Living far away from home was a key factor in accessing this particular character, “the distance makes you see things in a different way”. Brial explains that he himself has an obsession with collecting objects. They help him create a kind of identity map in his mind: as he travels, he picks up small things, locating himself in relation to the world via the small mementos that then become a part of his physical person.
Through references to sea kelp and flower garlands, delicate flowers or the shadows of a garden fence on a sunny day, we can see that nature is a familiar language for the young designer. Brial says, “every time something important in my life happened, it was usually on a beach, or my dad would take me to a forest. Now I’m further away from nature, so I romanticize it a lot, and it comes into my projects.” Nature has an emotional charge, it’s significant, connected to his family heritage, and to many important cornerstones of his life.
He opens up to wherever he may find himself, but his push as a designer is based on this tension of leaving and belonging, of exploring yet feeling grounded. His family even has a tradition that answers this tension. After travelling for many years in their youth, his grandparents finally settled down, and planted a tree in their garden, dedicated to each grandchild.
Throughout his collections, for Brial has used this origina story as a seed for a broader creative investigation into protection, immigration, and identity. His work poses questions around what it means to put down roots while remaining in motion, themes that carried directly into his third-year collection, Where I am brought. Here, he created garments that physically protect the body, creating a barrier that contrasts with softer, more poetic textures, and therefore evoking the olive tree’s hardy resilience and its meaning for the young designer as a place of identity, comfort, and connection. For the knitwear, he was fascinated by the flower merchants who walk around with flower garlands on their shoulders. He translated this into textured and colorful yarns, long fronds hanging and moving around the body. External objects are appropriated and physically brought onto the person, becoming a part of who they are and what they communicate to the outside world.
Brial works in a narrative and continuative way. The starting point for his second-year collection, To walk in your ways, was the visual album “When I Get Home” by American artist Solange, inspired by her artistic approach rooted in cultural observation. Incorporating traditional dress with a desert aesthetic, for his silhouettes Brial drew from historical references through a contemporary lens. Essentially, he is a story teller, never completely wiping the slate clean, every collection is a continuation of what came before, “for me it’s a constant process, you evolve a little bit every time, there’s always going to be this thread between each other.” Through his collections he’s writing his story, exploring the tensions that define his identity, and creating a creative practice that is an ever evolving thread.
The three collections weave together a narrative that tackles identity and place in the world, while highlighting the designer’s acute and mature awareness that there is a wider unknown. He is curious and keen to explore this by asking questions like, what does it mean for the individual, and for the body, to be at once protected and open? To be metaphorically at sea, desperate to experience the world, but longing to go home?
His universality lies in his ability to translate this wondering into garments and into something anyone who has ever left home to pursue a wider perspective can recognize. In Brial’s work, everyone who has left home has a refuge. His collections are a way for him to ground himself, and his knitwear is a map: “you create a map in your mind, a tapestry of things that you connect to, like who you are as a person and where you’re from.” His exploration of identity is not rare for an emerging designer, but his ability to make it relatable and accessible is unique. We’re excited to see what his next destination will be.
CREDITS
Cover image:
- Three looks from Victor Brial‘s third year final collection, featured in “Glad You’re Awake”, a project in collaboration with Pavillon Bosio for the Montecarlo Fashion Week
