Who are Gardouch and Rkivecity, the Sphere showroom’s latest additions?

This season, the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (FHCM)’s Sphere showroom welcomes two emerging labels for the first time. Gardouch and Rkivecity join five labels already well established in the French capital: C.R.É.O.L.E, Cachí, La Cage, Ouest Paris, and Lazoschmidl.

Hosted at the Palais de Tokyo during Paris Fashion Week Homme from January 21 to 25, the two brands were selected for their distinctive visions. Gardouch is a French label named after a village in south-west France. Founded in 2024 by Rémy Guerra, a graduate of Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Gardouch is guided by a central idea: memory fades if we cease to hold on to it.

Two labels exploring time

With collections entitled “Le loup au fond du couloir” and “Jouer à faire semblant,” multidisciplinary artist Rémy Guerra draws directly on his childhood memories, reframing them through themes that continue to resonate with adults. His colourful, eclectic hats, tops, dungarees, and tutus evoke a birthday-party wardrobe, poised between naïve craftsmanship, anachronisms, and deadstock materials. With his “Les ombres” line, the designer strips the pieces of colour, rendering them entirely black and leaving only their essence.

Alongside Gardouch, Sphere welcomes Rkivecity. The label crafts a wardrobe inspired by a host of elements gleaned from the everyday by its designer, Ritwirk Khanna. A graduate of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, where he immersed himself in material histories, vintage, and archives, he came to believe that garments bear the imprint of time. On his return to India, he worked in Gujarat’s Special Economic Zones on textile waste management projects, an experience that revealed the scale of overconsumption and marked a turning point in his career.

In the early 2020s, the designer founded Rkivecity, a brand conceived as a research and design laboratory dedicated to circularity. Drawing on traditional techniques such as boro and raffoo, the brand develops zero-waste remanufacturing systems. Each piece is repaired, reconstructed and reinterpreted to give it new life, in a process that saw Ritwirk Khanna take the top prize at the R|Elan Circular Design Challenge, a United Nations-supported award centred on circularity.