Founded in 1985 by Sophie Rénier and Paul Droulers, Jack Gomme has spent forty years embracing experimentation and repurposing unexpected materials. The brand’s story is intertwined with the inaugural Hyères Festival, where Jack Gomme was among the first wave of participants and early prize winners, earning recognition for its playful, hybrid pieces. It is only fitting, then, that decades later, this same festival is where they met Marianna Ladreyt.

Ladreyt is part of a new wave of French creatives who move fluidly between art, craft, and fashion. She often works with raw or unexpected materials, and there’s a childlike curiosity to her universe. Her work has been shown in galleries as well as fashion contexts. This collaboration sees mischievous fish, Akamas, drifts through the collection like a quiet playful signature. The collaboration launched on April 1st on the brand’s e-commerce platform and across its three Paris boutiques. In France, April 1 st is known as Poisson d’Avril, a day devoted to lighthearted pranks and playful deception. The tradition often involves secretly taping a paper fish onto someone’s back, but this year we stepped into Jack Gomme atelier to upcycle our own fish into whimsical objets d’art with Ladreyt on hand helping us.

In the collab are two of Jack Gommes’s signatures, the Liris messenger and the asymmetrical Kangourou, reimagined by Ladreyt, becoming hybrid forms. True to Jack Gomme’s origins, the collection also embraces an ethos of resourcefulness. Crafted through upcycling, using buoys and dormant materials from the house’s own reserve channeling a playful vision of all the possibilities of sustainability we can have, if we want to play, and humor doesn’t hurt.