AZ Factory continues with a strategy of experimental collaborations, giving carte blanche to emerging designers. The label founded by the late Alber Elbaz with Swiss group Richemont has this time joined forces with Finnish designer Jenny Hytönen, who won the jury Grand Prix and the city of Hyères award at the 2022 Hyères Festival. She will create 10 looks for AZ Factory, which will be unveiled at a presentation during next January’s Paris Haute Couture Week.
 

Hytönen succeeds in this exercise French designer Lora Sonney, like Hytönen a finalist at the 37th edition of the Hyères Festival’s fashion competition, who dropped a capsule collection for AZ Factory in July. In January 2023, the project was commissioned to French designer Tennessy Thoreson, while the first emerging designer invited to stage a show with AZ Factory during haute couture week was Cyril Bourez in 2022.
 
Hytönen, 26, was born in Helsinki, where she graduated at Aalto University, and specialises in knitwear and leather. She combines sophisticated technical and artisanal skills with an eye for future trends, and is notably adept at tapping experimental technology for her creations. After moving to Paris and working for a year and a half at Olivier Theyskens, Hytönen went freelance at the start of 2023.

At Hyères, she made her mark with a powerful collection that blended a punk/BDSM aesthetic with a glam sexy mood, managing to perfectly combine these two contrasting domains in outfits that veered from sheer, crystal-covered knitwear to studded recycled leather fabrics. The collection’s statement item, which she handcrafted herself, was a wedding dress that allowed a glimpse, on the transparent left side of the chest, of a scarlet LED pulsing like a beating heart.
 
Following her Hyères Festival victory, Hytönen designed capsule collections for Galeries Lafayette and for Icicle.