They're intended to shock, and shock they do. Even the jaded set has to raise an eyebrow at the Paris shows...
We couldn't have had a better spot at the incredible Louis Vuitton show today, facing curved walls that mimicked long corridors, with numbered doors and fabulous wallpaper. This was the Louis Vuitton hotel, and we eagerly awaited the delectable guests and the trouble they'd get into.
Piano music set the tone, with the haunting but romantic strains of Alexandre Desplat's Tree of Life soundtrack, and the doors started to open. Each door was left open until the girls made their way around, giving us enough time to absorb the beautiful LV trunks in their rooms, with carefully orchestrated video projections of domestic hotel scenes.
All the girls wore the same black flapper-style wig, and the look was haute Hitchcock glamour, with a dash of Desperate Housewives. The clothes looked like they had been slipped into for the purpose of seduction, and it was unclear whether our girls were coming home or going out. The truth emerged that the real party was in their rooms, as they paraded about in lingerie numbers paired with subverted men's coats, some sprouting marabou, others encrusted with crystals that crept up from the base. A jacket was worn with nothing but high heels and knickerbockers, and negligee maxi-dresses clung to braless bodies as our heroines flitted between each other’s rooms.
It was a beautiful presentation, with flawless execution, and we were entirely submersed in Marc Jacobs' world, full of exotic, glamorous vamps. We wanted to have a hotel slumber party! Of course Jacobs had the final laugh, emerging at the end in boldly patterned silk pyjamas, the only man in a hotel full of beautifully dressed women. Although apparently he only had eyes for his old friend who walked the show, Kate Moss, judging by their après-show bisou.
The Paris runways can always be counted on for crazy stagecraft. We won't be forgetting these any time soon...
The five singular sensations from Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Alexander McQueen, Valentino, Hakaan, Hermès...
Karl Lagerfeld is a worldly man, and he doesn't need cornea-burning Indian embroideries or reassuring prints of Renaissance paintings to prove it. But apparently he does need a stage design consisting of a massive spinning globe in the center of the Grand Palais (as always) with sparkling dots marking all Chanel outlets—which look to be in the hundreds. The symbolism was rock-solid. Perhaps no other brand operates on the same scale as this. One thing is certain: the sun never sets on the Chanel empire.
While the clothes didn't veer greatly from the brand's trusted tropes, they confirmed Chanel's jetset status. The chic modernity of these tweeds, bouclés, and florets in a predominantly black-and-white palette, resembling a night sky, were light years away from Lagerfeld's Scottish romp just months ago, as minimal as a Chanel girl can possibly be. Bags were orbs on a chain and boots were decked out in rockstar studs and still more chains (and wouldn't have looked out of place on a certain designer's own feet).
And if anyone was still confused about Chanel's place in the world, the models wore brightly colored fur wigs that Lagerfeld said were based on Anna Wintour's signature bob. It's enough to wonder who's orbiting who.
The five singular sensations from Giambattista Valli, Stella McCartney, Sacai, Paco Rabanne, Saint Laurent...
Phoebe Philo is a family woman and makes no qualms about it. She does not pretend or aspire to be the late-partying, champagne-swilling girl she is wont to portray at Céline. Her fall collection, except for pale leather thigh-high boots a fashion-savvy dominatrix might wear, was more about warm and fuzzy than cool and aloof.
Her models seemed to float out in a creamy palette of eggshell, faint blue, and dusty peach, with only a hint of black on shoes or in a button. They were swaddled in snug sweaters or they swam in enormous diva coats—like something an opera-goer might have donned in the '50s, sans pearls—with equally enormous collars that fanned out to the edge of the shoulder, or with extra-wide cuffs that spanned the length of the forearm. These were sumptuous, sublime cocoons. In the models' grasp were fuzzy, flat clutches that, when held close to the body, took on a fortune-cookie shape. There were no loud colors or garish prints of any kind.
More challenging dresses had built-in sleeves sprouting from the shoulder or the waist and tied in front at the belly, as you might expect a woman to do if she were discreetly hiding a pregnancy. To the Céline woman, privacy is the ultimate luxury.
Givenchy launched its fall collection, and its new Twitter page, with a cryptic tweet: "The strength of gypsies meets the romanticism of a Victorian feeling." Two very differing views of femininity, but held together by another tweet that came later, a kind of miniature manifesto from Antony Hegarty—of Antony and the Johnsons, who opened the show with a live set, accompanied by the Heritage Orchestra. That tweet called on Men (capital M) to "find humility and retreat" and Women (capital W) to "forge a new way forward for our species."
Ominous stuff, and totally Riccardo Tisci, who often plays with gender codes—and then some. His method is to turn notions of class, art, religion, and history inside out, piecing them back together in a parade of pastiche that manages to be both cerebral and visceral. And so, along with long, diaphanous, gypsy-like skirts and hard leather bodices recalling Victorian corsets, he sent out a range of loaded imagery and silhouettes that touched on his greatest-hits tropes, inviting—nay, daring—you to put the puzzle together.
The show began with Disney's Bambi printed on sweatshirts, belted with a bungee cord, and quickly moved into a series of hard, motocross biker jackets laden with zippers and paired with long, neo-grunge floral skirts. It wasn't long, however, before we were seeing his signature of signatures, kaleidoscopic prints, this time collaged with images of flames and Renaissance paintings, as well as a another recurring motif, a tooth-ringed shark's jaw. Many looks had what looked to be a padded vest, half opened to become peplum. Fur, too, made appearances—some real, some fake, often in the same piece.
All together it was classic Tisci: hard versus soft, art versus nature, danger versus safety, and of course masculine versus feminine. A full-circle sense of finish came with the last exit, Natalia Vodianova, who walked the round runway in a slightly slow gait, having run a marathon in the morning.
