Fade To Grey. Thom Browne AW23 Couture

July 4, 2023July 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

It’s quite shocking that Thom Browne officially showed couture just now. Pretty much every collection he has presented in the last couple of seasons is haute level. His entrance into the Parisian schedule couldn’t be more dramatic. The audience were seated on the stage of Garnier Opera house. Then the curtain went up. And they gasped at the sight: the red and gold auditorium was entirely populated by three thousand black and white cut-out illustrations of someone who looked very much like Thom himself. You had to wonder: was there to be something autobiographical in the formal introduction as a couturier he was about to make on this storied stage? Well, there was definitely a momentous sense of occasion in it for him. “It’s really special – the idea of taking almost American sportswear, the tailoring we do, and bringing it into a couture setting,” he said. “I thought it was important, even in representing American fashion.” The collection was heavily costume-y and theatrical in every possible sense. To the strains of Visage’s “Fade to Grey,”Alek Wek walked up the aisle and onto the stage wearing – what else – a gray Thom Browne jacket and kilt. She sat on a pile of gray luggage, and things commenced around her. There were Thom Browne gray suits and coats in multitudes, all strictly narrow in silhouette, but each almost a vignette in itself. There were patchworks of small country town landscapes, and seasides with sailboats. There were elaborate brocades, Prince of Wales checks, coats and short-suits embroidered with silver and gold sequined stripes. One coat had a pattern of 3D clouds woven into it.

Strange symbolic people began to come and go. Eleven characters dressed as bells, with bell-hats and enormous swollen patchworked coats and bells as spurs on their heels. Pigeon-people – one being Jordan Roth – in feathery bodysuits emerging from huge hip-level blazers. The drama took sinister turns. Bells on the soundtrack began to take on a funereal tone. A woman in extravagant black Edwardiana visited and left. And then another, in white. Ultimately, there was a visitation of someone in a white sequined coat, with a conceptual train on their head. Stephen Jones had obviously been working overtime, too. Then finally, a bride in a white coat-dress. Browne related the script, a dark psychodrama with a happy ending. “The main character was sitting at the station, thinking about her life and not being very happy. And then all of a sudden she sees all of her fantasies walking in,” he related. “She was planning on drowning in her sorrows. So that was the reason for all the underwater kind of things – the preppy East Coast iconography that I play with all the time. But then she realizes her life was actually better than she thought. So she didn’t get on the train.” Hard to be sure, but it seemed like a very American story about redemption and triumph – over depression and set-back. In any case, Browne was beaming.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Surreal Lady. Schiaparelli AW23 Couture

July 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

“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.

Revenge Dressing. Alaïa SS24

July 3, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.

Belle Du Jour. Saint Laurent Pre-Fall 2023

June 29, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

If you’ve had a yearning for big shoulders lately, you can thank Anthony Vaccarello for that. For several seasons now, and for both the women’s and men’s collections, Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent has been pumping them way up. It’s a look that rests on a squared-off line with a lot of impact. It’s also been a neat way to underscore his and the house’s exemplary tailoring skills which are impeccable. The deadly-chic Saint Laurent women’s pre-fall 2023 sketches out the look. There those shoulders are on masculine inflected overcoats, their swagger exaggerated by dark glasses, door knocker hoop earrings, and spike-heeled black boots. There they are again on leather and shearling jackets, some cut with a curvy blouson-y look or natty aviator versions, with featherweight shawls knotted at the neck to trail in the wind, leaving everything and everyone in their wake. The high-gloss, high-power era of fashion, roughly the late ’70s to the just dawning ’90s, is something that Vaccarello’s YSL has long been tapped into. Yet his smartness with it has been to amplify the look while also denuding it of some of its associations. Yes, he might be evoking that time with his second-skin black dressing, the wrists weighted with hefty golden cuffs, or with the roomy boardroom coats over sliver-thin pencil skirts that finish a fraction above the knees. But this isn’t a historicist retreat; there’s no desire here to create clothing shellacked with outmoded notions of power and status. Instead, Vaccarello’s attitude reads as modern: a touch of dishevelment with the hair of his models, a certain androgynous beauty, a kind of casual offhandedness about the whole proceedings. Vaccarello is designing for someone who’s curious about wearing chicer, glossier, more structured clothing, but who is still firmly living in, and dressing for, the world today.

Le Chouchou. Jacquemus AW23

June 27, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Simon Porte Jacquemus came to Versailles for his very first date with his now husband, Marco, and had always dreamt of showing at the palace. “A year ago I had a vision and sent an email to Bastien [Daguzan, brand’s CEO] with two pictures of Versailles,” said Jacquemus after the show. “I told him that I wanted people arriving by boat and looking at the collection from the boat.” And that’s precisely what happened yesterday at the Le Chouchou collection presentation. Guests were escorted to the runway on quaint little off-white bateaux, and as we docked, models stepped out and walked in front of us with the palace in the background. The French designer certainly knows how to put on a show. Rather than shoehorning his brand into Versailles, he borrowed the elements of the place that coexist with his point of view, including references to one of its well-known residents, Marie Antoinette. In his most design-driven collection of late, there were elements of the famous queen’s love for theatrics and ballet, the utilitarian language Jacquemus often references, and, surpringly, nods to Princess Diana. Lady Di inspired the ’80s shapes of puffy and ruched silhouettes, a polka-dot dress, and the “big rounded sleeves that,” he promised, “will become a signature of Jacquemus.” There were also tutus worn as is or as petticoats or mini crinolines. From the ballet came the collection’s flat mules and rose-print tights. Cute.

Scrunched-up silhouettes were the show’s common denominator and gave the collection its name: Le Chouchou. “Everything was looking like a big chouchou,” or hair scrunchie, Jacquemus said, “and I think it’s nice to have something super precise that people remember. They can know that it is the Chouchou collection and remember the castle and the puffiness.” He Most compelling, however, was the designer’s inventive tailoring, which at times felt like a callback to his earlier collections. There were the backless blazers like the one he debuted at The Met earlier this year on Bad Bunny, here with cutouts that exposed tutus; a variety of jackets cut and cinched at the waist to friskily accommodate the mini crinolines; and others with one sleeve detached and gathered at the top. Also fun were tutus converted into micro shorts and presented as puffy boxers peeking out of men’s trousers – this was Jacquemus at his most sincere, offering a playful interpretation of royal dressing. It won’t be surprising to see Versailles-core trending on TikTok after this show, together with the existing balletcore.