Louis-Gabriel Nouchi, of the Paris-based fashion brand LGN, was thrilled when he got the phone call asking him to design the costumes for the Paralympics’ opening ceremony, which was held Wednesday (Aug 28) in Paris, with a procession down the Champs-Elysees that ended at the Place De La Concorde. “I wanted to put all my heart into this project,” said Nouchi, 36, “Because it was the Paralympics, you know, and it was really close to me personally, because I’m working a lot on inclusivity at LGN in terms of plus size, age and diversity of bodies on the runway during fashion week.” Nouchi, who is known for manufacturing elegantly simple menswear with a punchy contemporary twist, grinned through a video call in which he was sporting a thick mustache and a simple black T-shirt and smoking a cigarette throughout the interview.
The Paralympics assignment did not immediately elicit in him a sense of patriotism. Though Nouchi grew up in Paris, he was trained in Belgium and worked in Italy during his early career, and he said that his time outside France had been a major influence on his identity as a designer. But the process of designing hundreds of garments for performers with disabilities brought forth his latent pride in his country.
Designing clothing for people with disabilities was similar to doing so for able-bodied people, Louis-Gabriel Nouchi said. But he had to take different factors into consideration. Photo: The New York Times “I was becoming more and more p.