Casey Vidalenc

The Casey Vidalenc brand first saw the light of day in June 1999. The multinational duet that is English designer Gareth Casey and French designer Philippe Vidalenc works in Paris. These totally different people are held together by the fact that they love creating and working and digging out useless — or so they seem at any rate — things.

All of Casey Vidalenc´s garments are hand-made: starting with the sketches, through cutting out the material to the final finish — in a word, down to every last stitch. The result is items that simultaneously look identical and are totally different; fragile, and yet hard-wearing. Paradoxical though it may seem, each design repeats the last and yet at the same time has its own identity.

Their creators´ love of useless things means that Casey Vidalenc´s collections consist of unlikely materials and components which the designers find everywhere they look, and in the most unexpected places. All these strange objects can either be used as found or else made over, depending on whether they are old or new, large or small.

The creation of Casey Vidalenc´s next collection can be viewed as a game, what with the spontaneous choice of materials and unexpected combinations. Gareth and Philippe use anything that comes to hand, mix up and join together different kinds of material, then add colour and the result is something inimitable and extremely interesting.

Their creative process is a repeated cycle: first the designers create an object, then, if it isn´t beautiful enough, they take it to pieces and create it anew — and so time after time, until the object takes on an ideal form and colour. Their love of second hand materials that look like they´re no longer good for anything reminds you of your grandmother´s advice never to throw anything away — «It´ll come in handy one of those days!» Funny though it seems, that´s exactly the guiding principle of Casey Vidalenc.

As of now the Casey Vidalenc brand is to be found in 40 shops worldwide. It says something that Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons provided these designers with premises in Tokyo and London´s Dover Street Market. The Cara&Co concept store is the exclusive distributor of Casey Vidalenc in Russia.