Papier Collé

Papier Collé: a new POELLE drop dedicated to the art of collage

Works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse made it onto the brand creative team’s moodboard.

The Lviv-based brand of refined leather accessories POELLE continues to work at the intersection of fashion and art with its new drop, “Papier Collé”. The name refers to the collage technique — one of the favourite methods of early 20th-century modernist artists.

“The papier collé technique, pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, was revolutionary in its time: introducing foreign materials into the picture plane blurred the line between painting and reality. Later, Henri Matisse developed the practice in his gouaches découpées cut-outs and Kurt Schwitters in his Merz collages. It is this idea — building meaning through fragments — that became the starting point for the new POELLE drop,” says the brand’s creative director Pavlo Popko.

The POELLE creative team’s moodboard included Matisse’s colourful cut-outs “The Snail” and “Circus”, as well as Schwitters’ experimental collages “Cottage” and “601”.

The capsule’s colour palette echoes the aesthetics of collage: a base of black, warm shades of brown and milky tones combined with accents of carmine, lime and ochre.

“We don’t quote art literally — we work with its principles. We are fascinated by the very idea of assembling, when the final result is not predetermined but emerges in the process. We imagined these accessories as collages in which individual elements — material, colour and form — interact and create a coherent whole,” adds Pavlo Popko.

The collection campaign by photographer Mariia Salivonova is also built on the principles of collage: flat and three-dimensional objects in the frame interact with the heroine — model Kseniia Shevchenko — creating a surreal yet playful mood.