The rage on social media just minutes after the finale of the Celine show–poignantly located at the footstep of the tomb of Napoleon, demonstrates that if fashion doesn’t offend, piss off or perhaps alienate someone that may be a customer, then it probably isn’t good fashion after all. I don’t remember a time over the last decade that fashion has fallen into such a tribal war with stone throwers on both sides digging deep trenches that may have also clouded their views.
It’s fair that the old Celine-faithful loudly mourn their loss as their perceived emotional connection to a brand is suddenly and so violently severed. It’s also fair that those rooting for the new Celine completely dismiss recent history from having any relevance to the next course for the brand and products. It is also interesting to note that, in the age of branding, the LVMH chiefs have decided to abruptly erase the past decade in one swoop to essentially create a new brand under the same name–well, minus the up accent.
That said, does the Celine show deserve that much uproar? Slimane single-handedly destroyed the old world and replaced it with the sensibility he knows best. There is an absolute connection between Slimane’s aesthetics and the clothes at Saint Laurent, and his debut at Celine was expected. So why was everyone screaming if this was what they had expected? Furthermore, beyond what’s show the bread and butter remained in the commercial collection that would drive consumers to stores. The fashion press lodged similar criticism in 2012 when he debuted at Saint Laurent, saying then and repeating now that during his time away from fashion he had not brought in a new perspective. Well, then and now. But what about the fact that Slimane actually makes the clothes that people want to pay money to wear, which is proven by his track record?
In a moment when casualization and streetwear has invaded high fashion and caused major brands to tilt towards the street in hopes of catching new consumers, there may be a contingent of luxury shoppers for Celine’s slim lines of suits, coats, bikers and dresses imbued with a certain cool factor, narrative and a different label, a shift toward more formal style as reflected elsewhere in Paris. This begs the question of if the current Saint Laurent customers will mutiny towards Celine.
Meanwhile at Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello navigates comfortably within the confines of established silhouettes and styles rather than immersing in a new route away from the familiar. Would Vaccarello be able to strike a completely different style away from one set by Slimane? So far at Saint Laurent, that hasn’t been the case. But fashion is always about change, so the question still remains. Changes, while critical to fashion, don’t always come easy or come at all.
Changes weren’t on the mind of Maria Grazia Chiuri, who couched her recognizable silhouettes within stricter dance movement. She also removed the successful slogans adopted from her start at Dior. While her clothes this season were not new, dancers swirling around models provided a smoother platform compared to the loud 1968 uprising décor of last season for a series of looks based around a stretch bodysuit rather than the more rigid constructions on softer dresses and a lighter approach for evening dressing.
But should we expect newer brands to change their collection so fast or should they be allowed to work on altering here and there to discover what works and what maintains the brands in business? Take for example the case of Sacai, whose designer Chitose Abe is a master of dissembling garments and assembling their fragments to create a new garment in a process called hybrid. Now, she deconstructs trench coats and jackets to make bits and pieces of the sleeve and collar of a denim jacket in some asymmetrical ways. But in future seasons, Abe may want to evolve her concept forward. The same can be said for the magnificent clothes that Sarah Burton has been making at Alexander McQueen–the tailoring and soft dresses coupled with hard footwear–with her deep knowledge and emotional embrace of history and culture embroidered in each of her collections. But once in a while, a whiff of fresh air can be fantastic.
Despite the many seasonal reiterations that conformed with the show décor, the look and feel of the Chanel tweed suit remained more or less constant without any significant evolution. It is perhaps the best-known fashion look of all time that still is being tweaked again and again for as long as anyone can remember. The durability and the stability of this signature look, adopted by the throngs of customers who were decked in their favorites, Chanel’s wares for the show testified to the brand’s strength in captivating consumers across a range of age and borders. Older wealthy clients wore their classic tweed suits and younger Asian girls decked out in more fashion forward items. Surely, the seaside mockup beach provided the perfect locale for all these nonchalantly loose and easy clothes–the tweed suit as a short bathrobe or as a loose tunic worn with plastic mules or a logo knit and stretch biker shorts–that are perhaps appealing to younger clientele.
It remained the duty of the group of so called ‘avant-garde’ designers to truly shake things up, each with a particular focus on their own craft and narrative fashion from these fashion poets. Rick Owens literally burned down a mock-up black steel Tatlin tower on the grounds of the Palais de Tokyo. Out of the ashes, a new vision of fashion was born with dresses made from old flags, torn denim shorts with intricate origami sculptured coats, paneled cut-out cloaks and mini dresses adorned with fringes. Some of Owens heroines carried torches in their hands, ready for battle.
On the opposite end, and in a very somber ambience, Rei Kawakubo presented clothes, for the first time after many years of conceptual shows, as an autobiography. But the clothes were far from ordinary: a fringed jumpsuit open at the waist revealing a bump covered by a CDG logo legging, a black satin coat with a twisted train and bumps protruding from the sides. Two of the outfits included a nylon printed jumpsuit, one paired with a cropped raw edge jacket top and the other with a cropped part-trench top with long stainless steel chains flowing out of the sleeves of the arms and legs. One of Kawakubo’s two protégés, Kei Ninomiya at Noir, showed intricate plastic twisted knots forming dense folding patterns on long coats and dresses on models with giant white wigs spewing seedlings. Junya Watanabe, showed a great play on mixing denim with 1950’s haute couture shapes and deploying crinolines into denim ball gowns, flare coats and A-line dresses, bringing the idea of couture back to relevancy.
While bringing back the idea of couture and incorporating it into current collections has been a focus since last season, it’s hard to believe that asking questions about clothes and proposing solutions for a women’s wardrobe. That makes Balenciaga the stellar show of the Paris season because Demna Gvasalia, the brand designer, asked fundamental questions about clothes and attempted to come up with his own answers. His rectangular shoulder dresses, coats and jackets reminisced the conversation he started last season with a high tech 3D molding fabrication. Now, these shoulders allow the fabrics to hang loose for clothes in between structure and fluidity with an emphasis on tailoring and draping. It includes a neo-tailored unisex big shirt and pant suit alternative, a sartorial challenge for the youth not accustomed to the idea of a more formal approach to their clothes.
At Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli brought the dream of couture back but in a free spirited manner. He created and proposed some great clothes for his clients, from a long black taffeta off-shoulder dress to lace, print and patchwork dresses with ease expressed in their flowing volume proportions. The root of Valentino is couture and now that a couture spirit has pervaded fashion, the new clothes destined for clients across the globe. Also, abandoning some of his past complicated art references, Joseph Altuzarra spoke to his women directly about the feelings of falling in love for the first time in a colorful, sexy and vibrant collection of summer clothes where the often more fitted and pencil tailored looks give way to an orange cropped knit, white cropped shirt and long, side-slit and pink-printed skirt or a blue print dress with cut out shoulder lines.
The spirit of freedom did wonders not only at Valentino and Altuzarra but also at Maison Margiela where John Galliano explored new ways to develop the Margiela’s aesthetics of counter culture today. Galliano continued his meditation on the ‘memory’ of a garment to create new garments with precise cuttings and a smorgasbord of coats and dresses shown on both boys and girls in a brilliant way that transfixed the discourse of gender. The opening look at–a couture-inspired gray boat neck dress with the outline of a jacket edge on the front, as if a memory that has been placed there. The idea of memory also served well at Paco Rabanne where the designer Julien Dossena kept the house’s main heritage material, metal mesh, and created a new story based on global travel and ethnic sensibility with a nod to the seventies. Jonathan Anderson also adopted a travel theme at Loewe centered around the expertise of craft.
In another recasting of couture, Thom Browne deployed master crafts in his ode to American preppy iconography–whales, lobsters, seersucker, ice cream cones, watermelons–all meshed into extremely complicated fabrications such as a coat where the surface adornments were layers and layers of precisely cut pattern laid upon each other to create the volume and shape. But the show was very slow-paced, a result of the tiny very high heels and constrictions, like a red tier skirt and knit top with an overlay of string vest that bound the model’s hands, wrapped like lobster claws. It was an unnecessary moment of discomfort in an otherwise fine demonstration of fine and fun clothes. It was the opposite at Balmain where Olivier Rousteing celebrated old Egyptian iconic symbols in Paris with hieroglyphic knit print dresses and, of course, the array of exaggerated shoulder mini dresses and jackets even in denim and elsewhere excess embellishments conjure an indefinite uncompromising attitude, employing the house’s atelier to create ‘couture’ clothes.
Clare Waight Keller, too, was affixed with the freedom of smashing and merging icons across eras, anchoring Swiss writer Annemarie Scharzenback’s androgyny as the template for her elegant Givenchy show. The clothes were not genderless, but just a reflection of both the masculine and the feminine in clothes. Her Givenchy men’s range is slightly more expansive, this time exploring the styles of the rocker Lou Reed with violet suits, bikers, cargo pants and long trench coats.
With many brands presenting co-ed shows, there is much less emphasis on dress down streetwear garments on the runway. The suit, albeit catered to a new generation, seems on the verge of a quiet comeback –a violet single-breasted at Givenchy; many versions of black single-breasted suits with pinstripe shirts at Celine; the double-breasted black slouchy high shoulder suit at Haider Ackerman; the rectangular-shouldered, slouchy, blood-red double-breasted suit at Balenciaga; the grey flare leg suit and stripe v-neck sweater at Gucci; and the black tailored jackets with gold sequined pants at Maison Margiela. It remains to be seen whether this shift away from streetwear will take hold further in the men’s fall show in late January.
Oh and by the way, the #mutiny sticker signs plastered around Paris, aren’t what you think. #mutiny is actually the name of the fragrance from Maison Margiela. The video campaign was on the white walls at the show and seen on a bus travelling from show to show blasting “there is no such thing as normal” or “defiance has no uniform” and “this is my mutiny.” It isn’t the mutiny of clients from one brand to the next and it was parked at the front exit of the Grand Palais creating a tremendous buzz kill for the audience exiting an exhilarating show.
But in a deeper sense, mutiny resonates in Paris this season, from the rage against Celine to the many designers who mutinied from their usual sources of inspiration to search for new ways to usher in a fresh direction for fashion and a new wardrobe proposal for the customers. Slimane may have created a collection he likes to almost everyone’s dismay and displeasure, but so did his peers who chose the freedom to suggest what fashion can look like in the near future: Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga, Piepaolo Piccioli at Valentino, John Galliano at Maison Margiela, and the kindred spirits of Rei Kawakubo and Rick Owens. They are the best of Paris.
The rage on social media just minutes after the finale of the Celine show–poignantly located at the footstep of the tomb of Napoleon, demonstrates that if fashion doesn’t offend, piss off or perhaps alienate someone that may be a customer, then it probably isn’t good fashion after all. I don’t remember a time over the last decade that fashion has fallen into such a tribal war with stone throwers on both sides digging deep trenches that may have also clouded their views.
It’s fair that the old Celine-faithful loudly mourn their loss as their perceived emotional connection to a brand is suddenly and so violently severed. It’s also fair that those rooting for the new Celine completely dismiss recent history from having any relevance to the next course for the brand and products. It is also interesting to note that, in the age of branding, the LVMH chiefs have decided to abruptly erase the past decade in one swoop to essentially create a new brand under the same name–well, minus the up accent.
That said, does the Celine show deserve that much uproar? Slimane single-handedly destroyed the old world and replaced it with the sensibility he knows best. There is an absolute connection between Slimane’s aesthetics and the clothes at Saint Laurent, and his debut at Celine was expected. So why was everyone screaming if this was what they had expected? Furthermore, beyond what’s show the bread and butter remained in the commercial collection that would drive consumers to stores. The fashion press lodged similar criticism in 2012 when he debuted at Saint Laurent, saying then and repeating now that during his time away from fashion he had not brought in a new perspective. Well, then and now. But what about the fact that Slimane actually makes the clothes that people want to pay money to wear, which is proven by his track record?
In a moment when casualization and streetwear has invaded high fashion and caused major brands to tilt towards the street in hopes of catching new consumers, there may be a contingent of luxury shoppers for Celine’s slim lines of suits, coats, bikers and dresses imbued with a certain cool factor, narrative and a different label, a shift toward more formal style as reflected elsewhere in Paris. This begs the question of if the current Saint Laurent customers will mutiny towards Celine.
Meanwhile at Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello navigates comfortably within the confines of established silhouettes and styles rather than immersing in a new route away from the familiar. Would Vaccarello be able to strike a completely different style away from one set by Slimane? So far at Saint Laurent, that hasn’t been the case. But fashion is always about change, so the question still remains. Changes, while critical to fashion, don’t always come easy or come at all.
Changes weren’t on the mind of Maria Grazia Chiuri, who couched her recognizable silhouettes within stricter dance movement. She also removed the successful slogans adopted from her start at Dior. While her clothes this season were not new, dancers swirling around models provided a smoother platform compared to the loud 1968 uprising décor of last season for a series of looks based around a stretch bodysuit rather than the more rigid constructions on softer dresses and a lighter approach for evening dressing.
But should we expect newer brands to change their collection so fast or should they be allowed to work on altering here and there to discover what works and what maintains the brands in business? Take for example the case of Sacai, whose designer Chitose Abe is a master of dissembling garments and assembling their fragments to create a new garment in a process called hybrid. Now, she deconstructs trench coats and jackets to make bits and pieces of the sleeve and collar of a denim jacket in some asymmetrical ways. But in future seasons, Abe may want to evolve her concept forward. The same can be said for the magnificent clothes that Sarah Burton has been making at Alexander McQueen–the tailoring and soft dresses coupled with hard footwear–with her deep knowledge and emotional embrace of history and culture embroidered in each of her collections. But once in a while, a whiff of fresh air can be fantastic.
Despite the many seasonal reiterations that conformed with the show décor, the look and feel of the Chanel tweed suit remained more or less constant without any significant evolution. It is perhaps the best-known fashion look of all time that still is being tweaked again and again for as long as anyone can remember. The durability and the stability of this signature look, adopted by the throngs of customers who were decked in their favorites, Chanel’s wares for the show testified to the brand’s strength in captivating consumers across a range of age and borders. Older wealthy clients wore their classic tweed suits and younger Asian girls decked out in more fashion forward items. Surely, the seaside mockup beach provided the perfect locale for all these nonchalantly loose and easy clothes–the tweed suit as a short bathrobe or as a loose tunic worn with plastic mules or a logo knit and stretch biker shorts–that are perhaps appealing to younger clientele.
It remained the duty of the group of so called ‘avant-garde’ designers to truly shake things up, each with a particular focus on their own craft and narrative fashion from these fashion poets. Rick Owens literally burned down a mock-up black steel Tatlin tower on the grounds of the Palais de Tokyo. Out of the ashes, a new vision of fashion was born with dresses made from old flags, torn denim shorts with intricate origami sculptured coats, paneled cut-out cloaks and mini dresses adorned with fringes. Some of Owens heroines carried torches in their hands, ready for battle.
On the opposite end, and in a very somber ambience, Rei Kawakubo presented clothes, for the first time after many years of conceptual shows, as an autobiography. But the clothes were far from ordinary: a fringed jumpsuit open at the waist revealing a bump covered by a CDG logo legging, a black satin coat with a twisted train and bumps protruding from the sides. Two of the outfits included a nylon printed jumpsuit, one paired with a cropped raw edge jacket top and the other with a cropped part-trench top with long stainless steel chains flowing out of the sleeves of the arms and legs. One of Kawakubo’s two protégés, Kei Ninomiya at Noir, showed intricate plastic twisted knots forming dense folding patterns on long coats and dresses on models with giant white wigs spewing seedlings. Junya Watanabe, showed a great play on mixing denim with 1950’s haute couture shapes and deploying crinolines into denim ball gowns, flare coats and A-line dresses, bringing the idea of couture back to relevancy.
While bringing back the idea of couture and incorporating it into current collections has been a focus since last season, it’s hard to believe that asking questions about clothes and proposing solutions for a women’s wardrobe. That makes Balenciaga the stellar show of the Paris season because Demna Gvasalia, the brand designer, asked fundamental questions about clothes and attempted to come up with his own answers. His rectangular shoulder dresses, coats and jackets reminisced the conversation he started last season with a high tech 3D molding fabrication. Now, these shoulders allow the fabrics to hang loose for clothes in between structure and fluidity with an emphasis on tailoring and draping. It includes a neo-tailored unisex big shirt and pant suit alternative, a sartorial challenge for the youth not accustomed to the idea of a more formal approach to their clothes.
At Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli brought the dream of couture back but in a free spirited manner. He created and proposed some great clothes for his clients, from a long black taffeta off-shoulder dress to lace, print and patchwork dresses with ease expressed in their flowing volume proportions. The root of Valentino is couture and now that a couture spirit has pervaded fashion, the new clothes destined for clients across the globe. Also, abandoning some of his past complicated art references, Joseph Altuzarra spoke to his women directly about the feelings of falling in love for the first time in a colorful, sexy and vibrant collection of summer clothes where the often more fitted and pencil tailored looks give way to an orange cropped knit, white cropped shirt and long, side-slit and pink-printed skirt or a blue print dress with cut out shoulder lines.
The spirit of freedom did wonders not only at Valentino and Altuzarra but also at Maison Margiela where John Galliano explored new ways to develop the Margiela’s aesthetics of counter culture today. Galliano continued his meditation on the ‘memory’ of a garment to create new garments with precise cuttings and a smorgasbord of coats and dresses shown on both boys and girls in a brilliant way that transfixed the discourse of gender. The opening look at–a couture-inspired gray boat neck dress with the outline of a jacket edge on the front, as if a memory that has been placed there. The idea of memory also served well at Paco Rabanne where the designer Julien Dossena kept the house’s main heritage material, metal mesh, and created a new story based on global travel and ethnic sensibility with a nod to the seventies. Jonathan Anderson also adopted a travel theme at Loewe centered around the expertise of craft.
In another recasting of couture, Thom Browne deployed master crafts in his ode to American preppy iconography–whales, lobsters, seersucker, ice cream cones, watermelons–all meshed into extremely complicated fabrications such as a coat where the surface adornments were layers and layers of precisely cut pattern laid upon each other to create the volume and shape. But the show was very slow-paced, a result of the tiny very high heels and constrictions, like a red tier skirt and knit top with an overlay of string vest that bound the model’s hands, wrapped like lobster claws. It was an unnecessary moment of discomfort in an otherwise fine demonstration of fine and fun clothes. It was the opposite at Balmain where Olivier Rousteing celebrated old Egyptian iconic symbols in Paris with hieroglyphic knit print dresses and, of course, the array of exaggerated shoulder mini dresses and jackets even in denim and elsewhere excess embellishments conjure an indefinite uncompromising attitude, employing the house’s atelier to create ‘couture’ clothes.
Clare Waight Keller, too, was affixed with the freedom of smashing and merging icons across eras, anchoring Swiss writer Annemarie Scharzenback’s androgyny as the template for her elegant Givenchy show. The clothes were not genderless, but just a reflection of both the masculine and the feminine in clothes. Her Givenchy men’s range is slightly more expansive, this time exploring the styles of the rocker Lou Reed with violet suits, bikers, cargo pants and long trench coats.
With many brands presenting co-ed shows, there is much less emphasis on dress down streetwear garments on the runway. The suit, albeit catered to a new generation, seems on the verge of a quiet comeback –a violet single-breasted at Givenchy; many versions of black single-breasted suits with pinstripe shirts at Celine; the double-breasted black slouchy high shoulder suit at Haider Ackerman; the rectangular-shouldered, slouchy, blood-red double-breasted suit at Balenciaga; the grey flare leg suit and stripe v-neck sweater at Gucci; and the black tailored jackets with gold sequined pants at Maison Margiela. It remains to be seen whether this shift away from streetwear will take hold further in the men’s fall show in late January.
Oh and by the way, the #mutiny sticker signs plastered around Paris, aren’t what you think. #mutiny is actually the name of the fragrance from Maison Margiela. The video campaign was on the white walls at the show and seen on a bus travelling from show to show blasting “there is no such thing as normal” or “defiance has no uniform” and “this is my mutiny.” It isn’t the mutiny of clients from one brand to the next and it was parked at the front exit of the Grand Palais creating a tremendous buzz kill for the audience exiting an exhilarating show.
But in a deeper sense, mutiny resonates in Paris this season, from the rage against Celine to the many designers who mutinied from their usual sources of inspiration to search for new ways to usher in a fresh direction for fashion and a new wardrobe proposal for the customers. Slimane may have created a collection he likes to almost everyone’s dismay and displeasure, but so did his peers who chose the freedom to suggest what fashion can look like in the near future: Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga, Piepaolo Piccioli at Valentino, John Galliano at Maison Margiela, and the kindred spirits of Rei Kawakubo and Rick Owens. They are the best of Paris.
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