Fashion

“I wanted this season to feel much more free, spontaneous, painterly,” Schiaparelli‘s Daniel Roseberry said before the autumn-winter 2023 couture show. “The idea of the last collection was really to suck the air out of the room. It’s what happened. I think the idea was to really try to keep the focus on the collection and go deeper and deeper into the techniques we wanted to show.” The designer went into territory of his own this season, carving and draping sculptural, asymmetrical silhouettes out of black and white materials while experimenting with craftspeople to blur the boundaries between clothing, embroidery, jewelry and collages of textiles. The collection is not only surreal in its look, but also in its richness of textures and vibrant tactility. Roseberry took his conceptual cue sparked by the house of Schiaparelli’s long involvement with artists. It ranged into some exceptional freewheeling artisanal effects. Looking at Lucian Freud’s chaotic paint-dashed studio resulted in a multicolored ‘nude’ dress, made up of an irregular mosaic of paillettes sewn onto chiffon. Thinking about Schiaparelli’s classic gold embroidery led Roseberry to discover that a vibrant Yves Klein blue lies at the opposite end of the color spectrum. Hence the vivid blue that turned up, scrolled into a skating skirt, and continuing into spray-painted body-paint and landing elsewhere in coils of painted wooden jewelry. Roseberry made a smart move in detaching himself from the routine of reiterating too many of the trompe l’oeil body-part house codes he’s been working with since he came to Schiaparelli. Echoes of other couturiers signatures – like Jean Paul Gaultier corsets this season – continue to be a sort of acknowledgement of the haute couture world’s legacy and Roseberry’s great respect for it.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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The latest Alaïa collection by Pieter Mulier is hot, sexy, F-A-S-H-I-O-N. In another words, a perfect start of haute couture week, which quite ironically happens in the midst of one of the most tumultuous moments in France’s contemporary history. Taking place over a footbridge across the Seine, the fashion show couldn’t have been more public – a strong contrast to the intimacy of Mulier’s last presentation, which he held in his own apartment in Antwerp. “For me, that’s what it is about,” he declared afterward. “It’s about extremes. You know Alaia is high heels or flats.” The bridge bristles with lovers’ padlocks bolted to its handrails. It seemed an apt environmental accessory to the unabashedly sexualized, latex and visible-thong clad vision of women Mulier was unleashing on the world. “It’s the next step in what I want to say about Alaïa,” he said. “Not fetish – that’s not a good word – but it’s personal obsessions that I wanted to do in a way that other people didn’t. Using latex, using leather in a different way. Creating a silhouette that’s very feminine, but yet quite different than what you see today.”

Kinky fashion has its own long Parisian tradition – there’s nothing new in seeing the proposal of chic bourgeois women in immaculate tailoring who also happen to be displaying underwear. These male-gaze luxury fashion tropes have a 50-year history that goes back as far as Yves Saint Laurent and Helmut Newton. The 21st-century set of questions for Mulier center more on how to handle the empathetic argument that Alaïa always made for glorifying the physicality of womanhood; how to claim it as his own, and make it relevant in his own time. Indeed ‘time’ was the overarching theme Mulier was talking about—in the sense of the time it had taken to mould and tailor the silhouettes and add obsessive details, “like 35 buttons on a coat.” You could see the time-consuming techniques lavished, say, on the opaque-sheer splicing of horizontal bands of strips of leather and gauzy fabric, winding in varying widths down a floor-length dress. The tailoring was nipped to the narrowest of pencil skirts; the taut knitwear engineered to expose the thonged bodysuits that are, of course, Alaïa-central. If you’re looking for a revenge wardrobe, Mulier has it sorted out for you.