Valentino, Jean Paul Gaultier and Viktor & Rolf show at Paris Haute Couture Week
Pierpaolo Piccioli ditches tradition to show a more inclusive vision of haute couture on the catwalk.
There’s a distinct irony in play with Valentino’s latest collection, Anatomy of Couture, shown at Paris Haute Couture Week on Wednesday, the same day as Jean Paul Gaultier and Viktor & Rolf.
Astronomical cost aside, the end point of haute couture is about crafting one-off garments for a particular client to their specific body shape.
Yet, the starting point has always been for each house to work with a single in-house fit model when creating pieces for the catwalk show.
That fit model is, traditionally, tall, willowy and very thin.
This season, Valentino’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli worked with not one, but 10 fit models ahead of the show in, relatively speaking, a variety of shapes and ages.
“I wanted to delve into the idea that beauty has nothing to do with models, beauty is about humanity,” Piccioli told Women’s Wear Daily.
“I like the variety.”
The results were beauty in extremis.
Piccioli always manages to imbue his catwalk shows with a heightened level of emotion.
As models sauntered through the house’s salons on the Place Vendome to a soundtrack featuring the mournfully angelic voice of Anonhi, each was wearing a design that enhanced her personal physicality.
Sequinned sheaths, swathed chiffon and corseted minidresses all played to the strengths of the wearer, while trouser ensembles with elegantly voluminous opera coats offered an easy glamour.
Piccioli’s use of colour has always been daring and forthright, continuing here in solid hues of shocking pink, lilac and lime, and combinations including two shades of chartreuse with fuchsia.
The second iteration of Jean Paul Gaultier’s new haute couture concept – in which another designer comes in to reinterpret the house codes – was offered this week from Y/Project designer Glenn Martens.
Gaultier’s famous Breton stripes were turned into a simple knit dress, then covered with tiny coral branches; peachy corsetry was reinterpreted into an evening gown, with lacing swooping around the full skirt, and elsewhere in a laced-up fitted top worn over denim skirt.
The real drama was seen in wildly ruffled and swirled skirts and dresses that resembled undulating coral formations.
If anxiety has been an overriding theme of the past couple of years, then Viktor & Rolf have expressed it in fashion form.
While it was based on a vampiric theme, the sky-high necklines were the very embodiment of that raised-shoulder stress; also a good way to avoid some neck snacking.
From black-and-white tailoring, reminiscent of the bloodsucker in the 1922 film Nosferatu, through to pretty tiered gowns finished with ruffles and bows, an amusing sense of foreboding ran throughout.
“Dracula is such a powerful symbol of the fear of change in society,” designer Rolf Snoeren told Vogue.
“In Old Hollywood movies you have the archetypal scary image of the person in the doorway.”
In today’s climate, he added, “it’s a little bit the opposite—going out into the world again but cautiously”.