In Paris, the trousers are telling us a lot
Paris Fashion Week offered new silhouettes, old ideas and in an onslaught of luxury, new ideas of how it can look.
Fashion month has been a season of fresh beginnings and poignant endings. In Milan there was Sabato De Sarno wiping the slate clean at Gucci, a sign the fanciful imaginings of predecessor Alessandro Michele are no longer in fashion’s imperial favour.
At Alexander McQueen during Paris Fashion Week, Sarah Burton took her final bow. In her time at the British luxury fashion house Burton, who joined in 1997, created a remarkable body of work, including the 2011 wedding dress for Kate, Princess of Wales,while carrying on the weighty legacy of Lee Alexander McQueen, who died in 2010, and enriching this with her own point of view.
Her final collection included all the touches Burton has established as her own: tailoring and corsetry so concise it’s practically armour for the women who wear her clothes; handpainted flowers representing a symbol of feminine power; slashes of red beading.
One of the original supers, Naomi Campbell, who appears in the fervently discussed Apple TV+ series The Super Models, shed a tear as she closed the show in a sculptural silver bugle bead dress that swished as she strutted.
Burton was one of the few female creative directors in the industry and her clothes were a love letter to women. Certainly there need to be more.
Exiting stage right this season too was Gabriela Hearst, who left Chloe on a high note, dancing down the runway.
Ah, but fashion loves the new – new blood, new ideas (though these can be hard to come by), new faces. Its pursuit of them can be brutal.
The fashion month circus ends in Paris. Showing in Paris is the goal for many, too – witness Australian designer Christopher Esber making his debut on the official schedule. It had, he toldVogue Australiafashion features director Alice Birrell, “always been the dream to show in Paris, starting at design school”.
Fashion is entwined in the fabric of France, historically, culturally and economically, as shown by the preservation of savoir faire in couture ateliers, or luxury conglomerate LVMH becoming a “premium partner” for the Olympic and Paralympics in next year. Luxury fashion contributes a significant chunk to French gross domestic product.
So what to make of the newness shown in Paris this season? What does it say about the fabric of France and all those who look to the country for ideas about what to wear next? Well, maybe for one, that we mustn’t forget that in fashion, often what’s old becomes new again.
While Milan focused on a juxtaposition of high-octane sex appeal alongside clothes that expressed modes of comfort, in Paris designers dipped into the archives but some also considered the new.
The week started off with more muted shows in mainly monochrome and neutral palettes – an acknowledgment that for many times are straitened and clothes need to be useful.
Moments of colour and vibrant maximalism could be found in the goddess warriors at Rabanne and Rick Owens adding in candy colours to his signature black.
Louis Vuitton, which this season pushed along its Web3 strategy by creating a channel on social media platform Discord, showed breezy layers of mousseline and charmeuse in long, flowing skirts – some in candy stripes – and silk bomber jackets.
Indeed sheer fabrics continue to be a strong trend, carrying through from previous seasons
It was old, and new, to see Anthony Vaccarello take on the Saharienne, or safari jacket, and the belted-in jumpsuit, a trope Yves Saint Laurent debuted in the 1960s.
It was a super-chic switch-up from the high-voltage sexiness of past seasons. A smart one, too, when you consider how women of all ages and sizes would enjoy wearing such pieces (or the versions that inevitably will trickle down to the high street – buy the best quality you can afford, this is a piece you can turn to forever).
At Yohji Yamamoto was the reminder of how one colour, black, can be reimagined endlessly if the details are considered. The avant-garde designer, who turned 80 this month, was a favourite of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, who died in 1999 and who has become the ultimate pin-up for conceptual minimalist ’90s style. Her style is a constant on designers’ mood boards and Instagram, and is set to go into overdrive when a new book, CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, A Life in Fashion by Sunita Kumar Nair, is published next month.
The details were paid attention to at Valentino, where Pierpaolo Piccioli used a puffy lattice-like openwork detail of lilies, doves and pomegranates across dresses, jackets and even denim in a technique he described as “high relief”, a term from sculpture where “what you see as decoration becomes the construction itself”. It was the first show for Valentino since Kering bought a 30 per cent stake, with the option to acquire full ownership.
At Loewe, where creative director Jonathan Anderson consistently challenges ideas of proportion and shape, the adage the higher the trousers, the closer to God was deployed. Trousers were cut halfway up the rib cage, subverting a tried-and-true silhouette, alongside cocoon-like blanket cardigans (who needs arms anyway?) and special pieces such as a cascade of crystal flowers fashioned into a top, worn with jeans. On the accessories front, Anderson debuted a squashy bag that tucked under the armpit that we’re going to see everywhere.
Of his Harry Highpants silhouette, “The proportion looks new to me,” Anderson told reporters after the show.
And you know, it did – a reminder that a slightly different hemline, or a new cut of trousers can change our relationship with clothes and our bodies.
The theme of quiet luxurymay have prevailed still through the season, sometimes to a dulling effect, but nobody has the byword or can make it so special quite like Hermes. Creative director Nadege Vanhee-Cybulski worked with a palette of rich burgundy, reds and browns in clever knitwear that could be unbuttoned and unzipped to create a new garment, lush leather pieces and beautiful tailoring. On her mind? “I was talking about friendship between women and the friendship of clothes,” Vanhee-Cybulski told Vogue Runway. Because the Hermes woman, like all of us really, wants clothes to be her friends – to not pinch or pull, to feel good every time you wear them.
Also thinking about friends was Demna, creative director of Balenciaga. He roped in family and friends for a show he described as being deeply personal.
His mother, Ella, opened the show wearing a padded coat with four sleeves (much to do about sleeves this season). His husband, Loik Gomez, closed the show as the bride. Friends and industry faces Demna has known along the way walked the runway.
The line-up included respected fashion critic Cathy Horyn, to the thrill of fashion scribe cohorts – a sign of fashion enmeshing with the culture. Another? New TikTok star Sabrina Bahsoonaka, aka Tube Girl, who has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for her videos of herself dancing in fashionable outfits on the train in the past month, not only sitting front row at the Balmain show but walking the runway too. For what it’s worth, the hashtag #tubegirl has been viewed almost 800 million times on TikTok.
After the pared-back collection Demna showed in March – interpreted as a sign of contrition following the much publicised controversy of the brand’s holiday campaign – this season was something of a return to the amped-up ideas for which Demna is known. There was big glamour, wonky tailoring with cartoonish power shoulders, ditsy acid florals, sweatpants worn with fluffy mules.
Demna says he wanted to show another idea of what luxury looks like: “I don’t want to give people a proposition to look like they’re rich or successful. Because luxury is top down, and what is often seen as quite provocative about me is – I do bottom up.”
So, new ideas then. There’s always Paris.
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