Vince and Schwarzenbach
Image from the Vince Women’s FW 2025 RTW campaign
Vince’s distinctive vision in their FW 2025 collection led me to wonder about their inspiration. Once I learned about AnneMarie Schwarzenbach’s role as muse, 83 years after her death, it was a rabbit hole that I couldn’t resist going down.
Vince itself was founded in 2002 by John Vincent Comuto, together with Rea Laccone and Christopher LaPolice. Creative Director Caroline Belhumeur has been at its helm since 2017, a refreshing rarity in the age of musical chairs. Infused with a California laid-back aesthetic, featuring quality fabrics and distinctive tailoring, Vince evokes easy-to-wear luxury. For FW 2025, the brand channeled the easy elegance and androgenous styles of AnneMarie Schwarzenbach, as well as the softer side of early 20th century romanticism.
Schwarzenbach led a volatile and adventurous life. Born in 1908 to a wealthy Swiss family, she died in 1942 at the early age of 34, having lived her life championing her values as an anti-fascist during the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. She had traveled extensively even before meeting the acclaimed photographer Marianne Breslauer, whom she first encountered while living together in Berlin. The two would go on to travel together extensively, across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, with Breslauer documenting their travels via photography and Schwarzenbach in writing. In one notable adventure, the pair trekked across the alps on an assignment for a Berlin agency before Breslauer was asked to use a surname to hide the fact that she was Jewish.
Outside of her friendship with Breslauer, Schwarzenbach had an intimate circle of friends that included the family of Thomas Mann (winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature), which her parents encouraged her to renounce with the rise of the Nazi regime. She refused. Instead, by 1942 she was an accredited journalist to Free French in the Belgian Congo.
Her noble life unfortunately had a darker side. Many unrequited love affairs (she identified as bisexual, and she dressed purposefully to reinforce her androgenous appearance) and a lifestyle that vacillated between isolation and intense socializing, as well as a troubled relationship with her parents, took its toll in the form of depression and morphine addiction, and she attempted suicide twice. Ironically, when she died at the age of 34 it was due to a bicycle accident in which she hit her head.
So, why would Vince choose this woman, this bisexual, adventurous, strong woman, a champion against fascism, as their inspiration for the FW 2025 collection? The brief biography of Marianne Schwarzenbach on their website overlooks some of the more dramatic elements of her history, but nonetheless, I find it to be a brave choice. I don’t believe I need to extrapolate on the reasons that her story resonates in the current moment. I applaud Vince for choosing this exemplary woman as their inspiration for their current collection, which is the epitome of relaxed, refined, elegance made simple, for any gender affiliation.
