Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Paris Fashion Week: The Verdict

Fashion will always reflect whatever is going on in society, but in the current debates relating to sexual misconduct and gender equality designers have newfound purpose in life. This is something that relates directly to clothes: the signals we send through how we dress to present ourselves. Over the past week in Paris, I’ve been enlightened and elated by some of the things these designer philosophers have told me. “Sometimes it feels as if women have to renounce their femininity to be stronger. I don’t think you need to be authoritarian to be assertive. Today, romanticism is not a weakness, it’s a strength. You can be assertive and not be aggressive,” Pierpaolo Piccioli said before his Valentino collection, which turned the stereotypes of romanticism into something bolder and stronger without ever venturing into masculine territory. I loved his gentle proposal for a uniform to face the world in. “Every hero or heroine in romanticism has had to pay sacrifice. If you’re rational you’re fine but if you’re a romanticist you have to pay sacrifice,” he told me. “I think it’s time to say you can be a romanticist and everything can still be fucking good.”

Everywhere you looked, someone was reflecting on these revolutionary times. “Clothes are communication and that communication very often is about seduction. What does that mean now and what are the results that people are looking for?” Rick Owens said after an avant-garde show, which embodied the extreme sense of seductive self-expression fashion can deliver. “I don’t think we’ve had a cycle like the current one we’re in exactly, but I thought to not notice it is not the right thing to do,” he told me. “I thought I had to at least observe. It was a reflection of it, even if I don’t have anything amazing to say about it.” By “it”, did he mean #MeToo? Second-wave feminism? Time’s Up? “I’m not saying it, you are. The world has become such an ultra-sensitive place. I’m scared to say anything anymore,” he shrugged. “I could never presume to know how women feel, but I think, what is appropriate for me to propose to people? And I don’t know why it felt appropriate but it did.”

As his extraterrestrial dresses came out, Marlene Dietrich and Liza Minelli sang "Baubles, Bangles and Beads", one of the raven-haired, eternally black-clad designer’s favourite show-tunes. “I listen to Peggy Lee and that stuff every day,” Owens noted. In that idea of camp, Rei Kawakubo found similar relevance. She said so in notes for the brilliant madness of a tiered tulle skirt skewed onto a silhouette from the side so it was sticking out, effectively turning the whole profile on its head. Or a sequinned bustier and skirt applied wonkily to another silhouette, kilted naively to the side. Or how about the layered dress that looked like trifle? It was good fun; unpretentious and engaging like intelligent comedy. “There are many so-called styles such as punk that have lost their original rebel spirit today,” Kawakubo wrote. “I think camp can express something deeper and can give birth to progress.” In her jazz-handsy theatre, she proposed a previously unexplored solution to the gender politics of our time: a camp way of life, rooted in humour, exuberance and inclusion.

Asked how much the current women’s rights debates had played on his mind, Nicolas Ghesquière answered swiftly: “Every day. Everyone is exchanging. It’s a dialogue we have all the time. Working in fashion we have to be very, very aware of what is going on. I think it’s good to talk about it.” If his collection was the Louis Vuitton proposal office dressing in a post-Time’s Up era, it was certainly a bossy look, even if skirts and dresses were in the high seat rather than trousers. “We forget that some very strong women wore very feminine outfits, and I love this idea of women, who were changing the world and did not have to dress like men, or for men. The women I tried to show today are that,” he reflected. The notion that women need to armour up to exude strength was really shot down during the Paris shows. In her sophomore ready-to-wear collection for Givenchy, Clare Waight Kellerlooked to early 1980s cinema and Berlin, taking in the brutalist cityscape to paint a picture of its roguish nightlife through the atmospheric lens of film noir.

You could see her long-line tailoring, sharp leather coats and slithering lingerie dresses roaming the arid metallic streets of Berlin by night, like something out of the black-and-white filtered minds of Helmut Newton or Robert Mapplethorpe, Bowie and Iggy scoring that fantasy. She talked about sleaze and sass, nonchalantly bringing a sense of sexy to the table in a time when everyone seems scared of it. Stella McCartney joined in, embellishing bustiers and negligees onto done-up lace and velvet tops, quite literally pushing the old underwear-as-outerwear chestnut. “We embrace realness here, and definitely sexy. We are not scared of being sexy,” she told me. Neither was Anthony Vaccarello, who showed one of his typical minidress collections for Saint Laurent. “Always,” he said, asked about those scanty hemlines. “If it’s a long dress nobody says, ‘Long?’ Short, for me, is the best way to describe modernity. Legs are not something we have to hide for I don’t know which reason.” You couldn’t argue with that, especially in these explosive times.

In her second show for Chloé, Natacha Ramsay-Levi talked about women’s conversations with their own wardrobes: how one tweaks one’s own character through dress. “She really plays with herself. It’s her going into different characters to enhance herself. When you get dressed that’s how you want to communicate with other people.” Her mix of cinematic and medieval references conjured a bohemian air that had a certain retro Roberto Cavallivibe about it. These clothes may have been rooted in French flair, but you could easily picture a sexy Eva Cavalli zipping through the alleys of Florence wearing them. We may find ourselves in sensitive times, but European designers aren’t giving up on sexy that easily. “I don’t know if you heard about the letter Catherine Deneuve signed?” Ramsay-Levi asked me, referring to the letter signed by the legendary actress in response to the #MeToo movement. “I think it was very intelligent. Some of the women who signed it are saying shitty things, but if you read the text, the text is very right. It’s just saying, ‘We are women. We are different.’ In France there’s something interesting about that. You never get too much into one direction. You always balance more.”


At Vivienne Westwood, Andreas Kronthaler went to town on the sexually liberated, gender non-binary quality that’s always defined the house. Alternative go-go dancers were placed strategically as a wealth of genders and non-genders paraded around the glass box at Pavillon Ledoyen in bulgy rubber trousers, super tight floral dungarees, exaggerated 1940s skirt suits, knitted evening dresses and mad ball gowns. “It takes time to talk about this, to be fair,” Dame Vivienne told me when I asked her about #MeToo. “I think you have to put more balance into it, that’s all. It can’t just be that every time a woman indicts a man or every time a man indicts a homosexual man for abuse…” she paused. “I think it’s very difficult for men sometimes. I feel sorry for someone like Keith Richards, who had such a hard time. But it does happen, and you’ve got to be careful that we don’t condemn these people before they’ve been proven guilty. But yeah, it’s very important that women do this.”

Maria Grazia Chiuri, whose own stylist Karl Templer is going through such allegations and took a break from working on Christian Dior, celebrated the 50th anniversary of the youth revolts of 1968 with a collection that reflected the changes to the everyday women’s wardrobe triggered by 1968: trousers, blazers and denim. “What I think is unbelievable is that the questions are the same. The way we talk about them has changed, but the arguments are the same. What’s important now for the young generation is gender, race and the environment.” She opened her show with a knit that said “non, non, non,” likening the sentiment of refusal to today’s millennial spirit, using her 21-year-old daughter Rachele Regini as an example of the woke mindset: “I call Rachele the No-Girl. Whenever I ask her something she says, ‘No!’ And I think sometimes it’s good to say no, because it’s difficult. It’s not easy. I wanted to start this collection by saying, ‘No, no, no!’” she told me.

Chiuri never mentioned #MeToo or Time’s Up, but the connection was evident. “The relationship between fashion and change was very important. Now, in a different way – with the web – it’s the same. Fashion has a huge influence on the young generation so we have a huge responsibility in what we do.” Nothing could have summed up the winds of change blowing through fashion from the outside world better than Sarah Burton’s collection theme at Alexander McQueen: “Metamorphosis,” she said. “All the expressions of femininity.” She used the life cycle of butterflies – from egg to caterpillar to pupa and wings – to express the many stages of femininity. “Extreme nature, extreme women,” as Burton put it. The idea came full circle in fine fringed evening dresses in silk, the very life of which would have begun with a silkworm pupa only to end up in a butterfly-motif garment. There was something very organic about that idea. “It’s paradise found, not paradise lost,” the designer reflected. “There’s a sense of euphoria and positivity.”

It was a mood echoed at Chanel where Karl Lagerfeld erected an autumnal forest inside the Grand Palais and took a breather from all the debates with a collection simply based on the autumn season. “You know, I’ve always loved autumn. This is a kind of Indian summer with all the leaves. It’s a beautiful mood,” he said. “Autumn was always my favourite season.” At Balenciaga, Demna Gvasalia made a brilliant decision in unifying his men’s and women’s collections in one show to rule them all, orchestrated in several woman-to-man segments, beginning with the opening look of a black skin-tight devoré cocktail dress followed by the male version of that look: a black skin-tight devoré rollneck, which, by the way – nodding at the times we live in – sexually objectified the male body just as much (or little) as its female counterpart. But it was in garments featuring LGBTQ+ rainbow flags or the slogan “Balenciaga supports the World Food Programme” that Gvasalia got to flex the humanitarian muscle that means more to him than anything these days.

“If I do a print it needs to have more to it than just being a print,” he said, adding that Balenciaga makes considerable donations to the WFP. The collection felt like Gvasalia had found his footing at Balenciaga, something shared by John Galliano in his Maison Margiela collection, which exuded the confidence of having accomplished some of the missions he set out to achieve there. Carrying over his theme from haute couture in January, "relaxed glamour" informed the collection, like a coat worn as a dress under a jumper worn as a jacket. Look around the emerging designer landscape and Galliano’s front-running proposal of a new glamour has been warmly accepted. Designers like Matty Bovan and Molly Goddard find a new understanding of glamour in make-do and mend eveningwear and casual throw-it-on ball gowns. “It’s taking the idea that outerwear becomes the dress,” Galliano told me. “It’s almost like dressing backwards.” In a time when fashion has the opportunity to break new ground, you could apply that metaphor to the entire Paris season.

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