A long, strange season it has been. One filled with ambiguity, rumor and infighting (Show now, sell now! Over my dead body!), that aside from some discernible trends — an elongated silhouette; leopard; the continuing popularity of lingerie dresses; the haute puffa jacket — has left most questions as yet unresolved.
Who will run Dior? Don’t know. What about Lanvin? The latest name whispered in the wings is Bouchra Jarrar. Is Hedi Slimane staying at Saint Laurent? Your guess is as good as mine. Do shows matter, or is it all about Instagram now?
Ah, for that we have a response. “Social media makes people think everything is accessible” said Maria Grazia Chiuri, a creative director of Valentino, backstage before the show. She was standing next to Pierpaolo Piccioli, her co-creative director, both wearing black trouser suits and white shirts (Mr. Piccioli also had on a black tie; Ms. Chiuri, a handful of rings) and talking about performance art. Which for them is a synonym for a show.
“But what social media cannot provide is a sense of the emotion of a group experience,” she continued. “We think our job is not just to do things you can consume, because you can see and love beauty without buying it. It is to give that shared happening.” So they did.
Against piano music by John Cage and Philip Glass played live on a baby grand set amid the runway came an ode to dancers past: Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, Pina Bausch and Diaghilev. Some of it was wearable (pristine white shirts wrapped like a warm-up sweater, with a dark ribbon at the waist and ribs; pleated schoolgirl skirts and exacting navy coats), and some of it less so (a nude suede dress with draped spaghetti-strap bodice, the skirt sliced into studded ribbons to play with, and expose, the legs; a crinoline tutu). Though that was not the point. The effect — material doing fouettés and chassés around the body — was.
The theme gave the designers leave to express their penchant for couture-level ornamentation via floating layers of tulle embroidered with clouds, or folkloric runes, or feathered wings. It’s beautiful, no question, but it’s also beginning to seem almost rote. (Oh, look: another amazing bit of beading; uh-huh; what’s next?) The best pieces had the strict perfection of silk jersey, shirred at the shoulders and prepped for an arabesque. Subconsciously, they made you point your toes.
But for that, you had, as they say, to be there. In the end, Paris was replete with these grace notes; felicitous, if occasionally head-spinning, reminders of why this circus exists.
They started with the surreal — Giambattista Valli’s spun-sugar ode to the Swiss Alps in a fluffy fur, flowers and lederhosen fantasy at Moncler Gamme Rouge, complete with pretend snow and real cow bells. They moved to social commentary: Miuccia Prada’s high/low mélange of the bourgeois and the bohemian at Miu Miu with denim jackets done up like evening wear, cotton boxers, tapestry maxi skirts, tweed jodhpurs, little velvet dresses and bombshell brocades (and shorts). And they ultimately reached the sublime: Iris van Herpen’s 18 stations of the future.
Eighteen women faced 18 “olfactory light screens,” rectangular panels that refracted the light and reflected and distorted the woman (and dress) behind, doubling her image and transforming the audience into both voyeur and backstage visitor, and allowing the woman to dance, as it were, with herself. That’s not to mention the dress she might be wearing: a familiar neat little sheath, rendered extraordinary by technology and imagination.
One lacy spider web was laser-cut from wool; another knitted in micro-pleats from steel and wool to create a dense, swirling exoskeleton; another composed of glistening 3-D printed, transparent laser-cut hexagons (5,000 of them) as airy and alluring as soap bubbles. Yet another was made from intensely light tulle fused with iridescent strips so the “fabric” looked like liquid mercury. Why Ms. van Herpen’s name is not often mentioned in contention for one of the myriad creative director jobs available is one of fashion’s great mysteries.
If her clothes were singular, however, it was at Louis Vuitton that things got, literally, monumental. The artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière constructed three enormous geometric shapes — a sphere, a square, a pyramid — and filled them with the ruins of a glittering Atlantis. The better to excavate not just his own aesthetic history (and that of his house), but that of the collections thus far.
Columns covered in shattered mirrors reflected a story of motor sports and the military told in patent leather and wool. The rise of the machines was woven into graphic knit bodysuits and dresses, and ivory silk slip dresses came paired with leather breastplates or etched with sequined scratches, like lace or mud (it was hard to tell), a train suspended from the narrowest strap on one side. Road warriors were spliced with romance and a bit of the weird — a combination that also pretty much describes the underlying genome of the women’s wear month.
While it wasn’t mythic, it did have its moments.
By VANESSA FRIEDMAN
Source New York Times
No comments:
Post a Comment