Pauline Dujancourt Imagines Emotions in Textures and Colours

For her Spring/Summer 2027 Collection, Pauline Dujancourt creates joyous, diaphanous dresses for her “library of tears”

“Ever since I was a child, I thought letters, numbers, days, months had colours,” Pauline Dujancourt tells me days ahead of her Spring/Summer 2027 show. “I thought everyone else did too.” Dujancourt – who graduated from an MA in Knitwear from Central Saint Martins in 2022 already a Phoebe English, Alexander Wang, Simone Rocha and Rejino Pyo alum, starting her namesake brand shortly after – has synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon where the stimulation of one neural pathway involuntarily evokes that of another resulting in the activation of two senses at once. “It made me think, what if emotions had colours? What if you could put texture, colour and movement to them, what if you could wear them?” 

With this in mind, Dujancourt read Fassbinder’s 1971 play The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant – a complex study of love, obsession and desire. Supposedly based on true events from his own life, Fassbinder transposed the story from his male perspective to a woman’s. Cinema became fashion and Fassbinder became von Kant, the passionate, lesbian designer who falls in love with one of her models. Dujancourt started thinking about her own tears, selecting seven causes for crying as a sort of library: despair, grief, fear, pain, bitterness, sadness, relief. “Not all tears are the same,” she says with a Parisian accent. 

Dujancourt imagined what each tear would look like manifested in material. Those tears are now pinned to the wall of her studio, near Liverpool Street station: billowing vines of hand-scalloped lace flowers, featherlight floral organza, chains of daisies knotted in the designer’s signature Japanese metallic rayon-paper yarn, and woven crochet in dusty pinks, off-white, black, blue and grey, together in long fronds. Her tear library formed the basis of her Spring/Summer 2027 collection, titled The Bitter Tears.

As she walks me around the atelier, she points to different pieces – some still being assembled. “That dress is sadness,” she says, looking at a voluminous heap of fine embroidered tulle in a muted grey-blue on the workbench. “And this” – a vast panel of dusty-pink handknitted flowers, mounted onto organza – “will be bitterness.” There’s little bitter about what I see, but this is the synaesthetic lens through which Dujancourt sees them.

Her show takes place at the NewGen space a few days later – she joined the BFC initiative in 2024, the same year she was shortlisted as a finalist for the LVMH prize. With lights low, models illuminated by dramatic spotlighting floated gracefully around the snaking runway, carpeted by an Ophelian floral tundra. Each look was unmistakenly Dujancourt – delicate, elegant, balletic – and an exciting continuation of past seasons’ architecture, turning traditional knitwear on its head as she makes and manipulates her own materials with techniques known and new. 

Some silhouettes were exaggerated with dramatic projecting bustles; others were delicate, scant. Sleeves were ballooned, almost regally. There were dainty little spaghetti straps too, softly suspended on decolletage, backs scooping low to reveal dimpled lumbar. Dujancourt’s tear tangles fluttered capriciously behind models like tendrils or vines. They’re meticulous, crafted in diaphanous fabrics: tulle, organza, lace, tricot, cupro-rayon, and move through a muted colour palette in light grey-blue, pale pink, black and ivory. “Colours in my world tend to have a bit of grey to them,” she tells me when I visit her studio, the effect is something quite melancholic. “It is a little sad.” 

Flowers were at the core of every look. “A flower is almost the epitome of feminine fragility, delicacy and beauty,” she says, considering femininity as softness and strength at once. Metallic daisies adjoined to each other to create a camisole that looks like armour. Hand-scalloped lace flowers rain from corsets and bodies. Dujancourt used a small handloom to weave thousands of delicate waterlily-like flowers from baby alpaca wool and mohair. “Each flower is so lightweight and fine,” she says. “Attaching them together with a Solomon’s knot creates this amazing, airy fabric, which is really easy to drape.” Two of the key looks were made from panels of these flowers woven together, she tells me, each dress requiring 700 flowers. 4,000 of those same flowers were sewn onto hide-like pieces of lace for the runway floor.

Dujancourt’s garments are hand crafted with great care and patience. She collaborates with a collective of artisans in Peru who help with the fiddly pieces she requires large volumes of. Every flower – waterlilies, daisies – is made by a different production group, each with their own speciality taught via video by Dujancourt in YouTube-style tutorials to ensure continuity in scale and tension. It’s a process she enjoys. “I know everyone by name, and exactly who’s working on each piece.” 

It was Dujancourt’s grandmother who taught her to knit when she was just a child, and she recalls it fondly. “My parents would drop me off where she lived in this small town in the east of France. My grandfather worked in a local dye factory and he would bring back scrap fabrics for my grandmother. She’d cut and sew and knit garments for the whole family, and I’d help her.” The seed was sown. “I had always thought knitwear looked too old fashioned, too heavy, not very shapely. I wanted to work with materials, to drape on the body, to do something with material that was light and organic.” And that she does.

On the wall of her atelier, tear fronds hang from ceiling to floor. She made these earlier this year for an exhibition at Dover Street Market Paris. In July, Dujancourt was selected for DSM’s brand incubator programme, which provides comprehensive commercial, strategic and logistical support to niche emerging labels. “Fearlessly poetic”, is how Adrian Joffe, DSM co-founder and CEO, describes Dujancourt’s designs. “I feel the emotional transiency of existence paradoxically encapsulated in the sheer confidence of the vision,” he tells me. “It’s no surprise really we have found each other.” That same month, Dujancourt won an Andam award. She feels both grateful and relieved. Business has already quadrupled this year, which without support is hard to keep up with. “This means we can grow without having to panic,” Dujancourt says. “I don’t have to host showrooms out of my dad’s office anymore,” having done just that for years. 

I wonder what colour that feeling might be, what she imagines tears of joy look like. The not-so Bitter Tears of Pauline Dujancourt.