Reviews

Notes On Decadence. Louis Vuitton SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

This was one of the best Louis Vuitton collections in a while. In a long while. The Louvre’s Passage Richelieu was decked out in dozens of antique chandeliers – collected over many months, they set the stage for what Nicolas Ghesquière described in his press notes as a “grand bal of time.” At Louis Vuitton, Ghesquière has been fascinated by the notion of time and the way fashion intersects with it and doubles back. He’s a master at colliding references and juxtaposing surprising elements to create anew. With the company celebrating the 200th birthday of the house’s founder, Ghesquière had another reason to take up the subject. As company lore goes, the Passage Richelieu was used by Louis Vuitton for his meetings with Empress Eugénie, for whom he was the exclusive trunk maker. Eugénie might have recognized the panniered silhouettes of this show’s first few looks. The sumptuous, elaborately embellished dresses were girded at the hips in the 19th-century style, but where her gowns would’ve been weighed down with underskirts, Ghesquière’s dresses fairly bounced as the models made their way down the runway in open-toe satin wrestling boots. There were shades of Paul Poiret and Erté in these looks, with their finely beaded headpieces and art nouveau sunglasses. Only neither Poiret nor Erté would likely have encountered denim, and if they had, they never would’ve paired a beaded bias-cut slip dress with jeans, or cut a jean jacket with a tailcoat’s proportions. That’s Ghesquière’s time-traveling touch, which this time focused on opulent, untamed, nearly forgotten decadence. The preponderance of capes stemmed from another strand of Ghesquière’s story this season: he’s designed Alicia Vikander’s costumes for the upcoming HBO Max series from Olivier Assayas, Irma Vep. The show, according to HBO, “reveals the uncertain ground that lies at the border of fiction and reality, artifice and authenticity, art and life.” Ghesquière, for his part, is interested in the uncertain ground between the past, present, and future. “I like the figure of a vampire who travels through the ages, adapting to dress codes of the era,” his press release read. One cape came in polka dots with a jaunty jabot; two others cut diagonally across the body looked like going-out tops for the club, not a ball; and a couple more, at “the threshold of couture,” were made from what appeared to be feathery frayed chiffon. A protester carrying a sign that read “Overconsumption = Extinction” made it to the end of the runway. The magic of the ball was momentarily broken; reality was bumping up against the fairy tale. Still, this was peak Ghesquière, merging distant and recent fashion history with the relaxed codes of today.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Miu Angst. Miu Miu SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Miu Miu went hardcore Miu Miu for spring-summer 2022, and this is the best thing that could happen to us this season. There’s a strange correlation going on: the more complex and sometimes over-worked Miuccia Prada‘s main line becomes with Raf Simons, the better and desiable Miu Miu gets. Miuccia’s Paris-based label seems to be going through some sort of unapologetic renaissance. This time, the Miu Miu girl – who might equally be a mature woman – goes through a teenage angst phase. Imagine being in your mid-twenties when the pandemic hit, just about to make your debut on the corporate scene; your pressed skirt suit, ironed shirt and unwrapped nylons left abandoned in your closet for what felt like an eternity. When the world reopens and WFH is replaced with IRL, will you pull out that dusty uniform as if nothing happened? Or did something change within you? For Miuccia Prada, it’s a no-brainer. When it comes to the age groups whose formative experiences were interrupted by the lockdown period, continuing on the same track as the generations before them is no longer a given. If the seismic events of the last year-and-a-half taught young people anything, it’s to question those values, norms, and, indeed, dress codes. When the Miu Miu woman returns to the office, she’s chopping up all of those preordained rules, quite literally. Today, Prada marked her own return to the office by seating her guests in ergonomic work chairs and treating us to a back-to-work wardrobe for the post-pandemic age. Like rebellious private school kids cutting up their uniforms, she shortened the length of corporate skirts and tops – frayed edges in tow – until there was barely anything left to crop. It was as if waistlines and skirt hems – and necklines and top hems – had a magnetic attraction to one another, drawing ever closer as the show progressed. Midriffs were elongated to a degree that would have made Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera collectively blush in the early 2000s, if, of course, the very sight of those low-riding baggy trousers wouldn’t have made them faint first. In the process, miniskirts migrated into top territory and morphed into belted bandeaus, and someone came to work in just a beige bra and a matching pencil skirt, the elastic band of her underwear poking out. All this, mind you, in the fabrics of a businesswoman’s wardrobe. Prada hasn’t been doing post-show interviews this season due to Covid-19, but she did grace us with a few well-chosen words: “It’s so normal, but for me it’s so strange. Strange is not strange anymore,” she said with a shrug, and toiled on with her celebrity greetings. Certainly the new generations seem unfazed by the overt sexiness of the post-lockdown mentality. In case there are any apprehensive dressers left in this ‘new sexy’ climate, Prada did throw in some very viable new alternatives to the corporate wardrobe. Cable knit skirts with high slits worn with shirts and faded oversized knits made for a realistic take on ‘the generational suit,’ as did a stone-washed leather blouson with a matching box-pleat skirt. With Miu Miu’s angsty take on women’s business dressing, it’s exciting to see how those styling tricks trickle down to real wardrobes in near future.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Chanel, Chanel, Chanel. Chanel SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

For spring-summer 2022, Virginie Viard delivered us the pure essence of Chanel – especially the 1980s-slash-90s one. If not for the contemporary models, you could mistake this collection with a 1992 line-up. Back in the day, supermodels came bounding down the high, raised runways exuding joie de vivre as they twirled and vamped for the photographers who had jostled for prime position, not only in the mosh pit at the end of the runway, but all along its length. Viard wanted to replicate that ambience, and she succeeded. “I used to love the sound of flashbulbs going off at the shows in the ’80s,” the designer recalled in the press notes. “I wanted to recapture that emotion.” Viard attempted to channel that energy and joy in a collection that not only referenced the era in the clothes, staging, and accessories (purses shaped like N°5 bottles; piratically flared Louis heels), but even the soundtrack: George Michael’s anthemic “Freedom! ’90” – in a contemporary cover version by Christine and the Queens – got the models in the party spirit. At the end of the raised runway, for instance, the photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, now deeply enmeshed in the Chanel world, played old-school show photographers, snapping the models who stopped to pose and preen for them and seemed to be having the time of their lives, flashing smiles and flicking hair rather than assuming the habitual look of sulky disdain. The show also opened à la Karl Lagerfeld – who sent shock waves when he put Chanel-branded underwear as outerwear on the runway for spring 1993 – with a black-and-white sequence of briefs, swimsuits, and sports bras, occasionally veiled in spangled black net pants or shown with above-the-knee skirts. During an accessories fitting a couple of days before the show, Viard pointed out the crocheted effects she had worked on with braid company Bacus, and the spin on the bright spring pastel tweed suits – think of Chanel-clad Naomi, Linda, and Carla, shot by Steven Meisel for Vogue, March 1994 – that she had given the twist of a longer skirt or jacket flap in back, suggesting a traditional tailcoat. “Karl was always doing fake jeans,” recalled Viard, shuddering at the memory. “In the ’90s they always seemed to be with pink tweed – ugh! For me it was horrible then, but now j’adore!” Her own reimagined denim propositions this season included a pretty, summery deck-chair ticking stripe cut into stiff little 1960s-looking dresses with bold bands of black sequins, creating the trompe l’oeil illusion of a classic Chanel cardigan suit, and charcoal denim wafted with a butterfly print. Those butterfly wings were amplified as prints on drifting chiffon pieces that swirled as the girls twirled, providing another charming throwback to a moment that celebrated the happiness the fashion flock is feeling in a season of cautious reemergence and optimism.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Utopian Youth. Maison Margiela SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Oh, to live in his world… John Galliano’s Co-Ed collection – his name for his all-gendered ready-to-wear – carries all the hallmarks of the terrific Artisanal haute couture collection that he launched with a film back in July. To recap: the narrative swirled through a fantasy that connected historic imagery of Dutch fishermen with an imagined community of young Maison Margiela survivors, washed up together on a coastline. For spring-summer 2022, Galliano re-emphasized how inspired he’s been by “the dreams of the future that young people are having, and making their reality.” All his experimental work of last summer has now flowed down into a highly inventive haul of romantic-utilitarian textures, new silhouettes, sweeping coats, fragile dresses, desirable knitwear – and thigh-high fishing waders. While working through his fisher-people theme, Galliano said he’d come across the new phenomenon of electro-magnetic fly-fishing. “What the kids are doing now, is they’ve got these magnetic fishing lines, and they’re going out to fish out the trash in Canal Saint Martin, and estuaries. I thought, how genius!” he exclaimed. “This is something that is becoming a hobby. So the waders are perfect to wear when you go out electro-magnetic fishing!” He noted that the waders and the bright red, yellow, and blue tabi-boots also comply with the wishes of the climate-conscious generation. “They’re bio-degradable, I should add. Pops of color in 3-D printed, molded rubber.” Designing for what he imagines as this new brigade of ‘Utopian Youth’ triggered a whole raft of free-floating creativity. There are coats decorated with feathered fishing flies and others braided from strips of gray herringbone to look like a net, sailor collars, a brilliantly voluminous pair of high-waisted Dutch-boy trousers, and a conceptual meeting of cotton sou’westers and 17th century Flemish hats on the heads. Knitwear sails through reinterpretations of traditional Guernseys and Fair Isles and lands at one point on an amazing cream and blue- embroidered Delft-tile patchwork cardigan. There’s an air of the reclaimed, semi-destroyed, and reconfigured about the collection that is very in sync with Martin Margiela history here. That’s no stretch for Galliano, who takes glee in turning garments inside out, exposing seams, weathering, shrinking, and overdyeing fabrics. His ‘neo-alchemy’ has a sensitive, erotic, mysterious touch that is all his own. There’s a celadon silk faille beaded dress “that you can shrug off to reveal the lining,” sheer layers of black chiffon veiling, and a slip dress of spider-fine knit, covered with an iridescent mesh composed of recycled glasses lenses. As he signed off the call, he was laughing. “As a designer one is always trying to find a new way to communicate sensuality; what you reveal, what you don’t. I know there’s quite a lot of noise about S-E-X at the moment. But it’s a bit what we always think of…”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Surreal Beach. Schiaparelli SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

“People are coming to us as an alternative to the mass luxury houses,” said Daniel Roseberry said of his extraordinary take on Schiaparelli. “They’re looking for something really strong.” So that’s what he’s prepared for spring-summer 2022. Schiaparelli’s Place Vendôme salons were organized by room, and first up was Roseberry’s wildly imaginative bijoux of body parts – ears, nose, eyes, lips, pierced nipples, and so on – and leather bags embellished with the same. His exaltation of the human form also took the shape of a gold-dipped resin bib molded from a model’s torso and suspended from a chain. There’s an inflatable black leather bolero and matching belt, as well as an inflatable parka, complete with air valves; a fitted knit dress with raised details in the form of Salvador Dalí’s famous rib cage dress; and cone bras à la Gaultier every which way: in leather, denim, and silk arranged in swirls like the petals of a flower. The vibe, Roseberry said, was “David Lynch holiday.” Tailoring and outerwear, meanwhile, were classically cut, but treated to all manner of gilded body part baubles. Many of the cocktail numbers had their beginnings in the couture, including a pair of sublimely draped black silk charmeuse dresses suspended from gold chokers. A cropped but boxy bolero with outsize lapels had a different starting point, Roseberry said. It was based on the jacket he made for playwright Jeremy O. Harris to wear to the Tonys last month. The words Schiap Hotel were stitched around the hem of a densely embellished bathrobe. I’m off to the plage de Schiap.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.