Realness. Paco Rabanne SS21

October 6, 2020 | Design & Culture by Ed

Like many designers this season, Paco Rabanne‘s Julien Dossena focused on his signatures. Spring-summer 2021 show was an impressive vocabulary of the designer’s distinct takeaways he came up with for the brand – and it ranges from clothes you would see on the streets in Paris to chain-mail craftsmanship which equals to couture. And, as a matter of fact, the runway started on an actual street. The venue had a wide-open entrance in the background – the glimpse of the street was an intentional part of Dossena’s love letter to the girls of his neighborhood, not just the need of keeping Espace Commines safely aerated for the occasion. “I realized how much I’ve been missing being in the streets, passing people, looking at their style,” he said. “I’ve always lived just near here, between the Third and the 11th arrondissements. It’s a really diverse area, with people coming from everywhere, and expressing their individuality. I wanted to work some local realness. It’s what I’ve been really happy to get back to after confinement.” Recent controversies in France have made Dossena all the more convinced that he wants to stick up for young women’s rights to dress as they please: “I wanted to show a generous, affirmative sensuality. I was really noticing women in the street who were brave enough to embrace their femininity. Wearing super-short skirts, décolleté, and being proud of it.” Without even knowing what informed that underlying subtext some of the contrasts between last season, which was staged in the grand surroundings of the medieval Conciergerie, and this one, are refreshingly apparent. There’s the new emphasis on long-line jackets and midiskirts, a mix-up of sequins and stripes, lace and lingerie tops, and the suggestion that, actually, the glittery glamour of Paco Rabanne can go just as well with jeans. “And a kind of ironic flea market feeling,” he added. Many of the women walking in his show were friends: actresses, writers, interns, junior designers, students. Most definitely, everyone who was French in the house would have been conscious of the relevance of Dossena’s crop tops and the fact that he’d very visibly implanted bra cups into his complicated lace slip dresses. Since schools returned in September, a national row broke out when teenage girls were turned away from schools for wearing cropped tops and short skirts. The girls – protesting against being gaslighted for indecency and provoking boys – started a hashtag calling for all high school students to turn up to school on September 14 wearing something provocative. “It’s just so old-fashioned, these attitudes in France,” Dossena says. “These girls were really rioting. I’m so impressed by them.” Most definitely in the grown-up and otherworldly zone was the procession of all over pailletted, helmeted women who ended Dossena’s show – feminist guardian warriors, if you will. “If you look, some of the triangle paillettes are like knives, like a weapon. It’s quite a tough realness,” Dossena smiled. “We are definitely not about doing comfy bourgeois collections here.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

2132 Olympics. Thom Browne SS21

October 6, 2020 | Design & Culture by Ed

Thom Browne is another American designer who presented in Paris last weekend. While you always expect full throttle escapism from Browne, this season he resorted to something much more pure and toned down. Thom Browne’s “first and only” family trip growing up was to the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. He would have been 11 years old at the time, but he remembers Caitlyn Jenner winning the gold medal in the decathlon and Nadia Comaneci scoring the first perfect 10 in gymnastics. Yes, there are the many references to sports in his clothing, but there is also the fact that fastening oneself into his suits requires the mental focus of an athlete. For spring 2021 Browne has gone sporting at the 2132 Olympics, an event he imagines happening 239,000 miles from Earth on the moon. In a video he wrote that accompanies the collection, comedian Jordan Firstman and model Grace Mahary banter like sports commentators as models and flag bearers descend the stadium steps of the Los Angeles Coliseum. The venue was chosen both for its Art Deco architecture and its hosting of the 1932 Olympics. The silhouettes of the ’20s and ’30s inform the clothing, from the drop-waist dresses to the slim skirts, some pleated, others as straight as your back must be to pull them off. The entire collection is rendered in shades of white: ivory, eggshell, the palest yellow, the faintest gray. Browne chose the color as a symbol of hopefulness. Here it’s hard to divorce his creativity from that of his partner, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Andrew Bolton. The Met’s Costume Institute exhibition “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” opening on October 29 because of COVID-19 delays, features only black clothes save its closing look (a white Viktor & Rolf upcycled couture dress, a gesture of stepping into a new, hopeful future). Working exclusively with white materials also allowed Browne to present his impeccable craftsmanship skills. The techniques on display here are as meticulous as ever: seersuckers made of cashmere, embroidery so thick it’s almost quilting, cable knits, intarsia suits, and trompe l’oeil dresses – everything emphasizing texture and surface tension. Aside from the long Deco silhouettes, Browne also continued to explore the repositioning of garments on the body: skirts as tops, jackets as skirts, etc. With so much graphic information packed into each ensemble and the clothes themselves so strangely collaged, it’s easy to forget the models underneath, some of whom are actual Olympians—and the fact that this is Browne’s second-ever coed collection. Not that the idea of gender really matters much in the Browne universe; his clothes are made for whomever is brave enough to wear them. That seems to be the strongest message of this collection. Rather than try to change in order to blend in with the new normal, Browne has instead cemented his status as fashion’s most uncompromising couturier. What about wearability? When asked how Browne himself dressed during New York’s lockdown, he laughed and leaned back in his chair to reveal his outfit: cashmere cardigan, gray wool vest, shirt, tie, shorts. “I’m either wearing this – or nothing!”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Craft. Gabriela Hearst SS21

October 6, 2020 | Design & Culture by Ed

This season, Gabriela Hearst decided to show in Paris instead of New York not only to catch the spotlight in Europe, but also because it was the most sustainable and carbon-neutral thing to do – most of her samples and designs are produced in Italy. And since New York Fashion Week suffered from its cuts and was stumbling this season due to strict COVID-19 regulations, Paris really is a better option for brands like Hearst’s. “It was really important to us to push ourselves creatively, to not let the pandemic stifle us,” Hearst told Vogue. “It became the craft challenge.” The collection was a proper Gabriela Hearst line-up, relaxed, made out of top-notch materials (most from deadstock) and full of gorgeous, timeless garments. The tailoring that has made its way onto the backs of influential women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jill Biden, and Oprah Winfrey, took a back seat. Instead, and in keeping with the themes of comfort and ease that have defined the season so far, Hearst trained her focus on knitwear: a long crocheted tank dress of many colors and its ivory sister were both striking, as were a pair of hand-knit cashmere ponchos with fringe that nearly reached the ankles in back. The collection’s genesis was a shell bracelet from Easter Island, a gift from Hearst’s mother back in January. The designer re-created it as shell trimming along the edges of circular cut-outs and on the straps of two repurposed silk dresses, making keepsakes to treasure of what were otherwise simple silhouettes. The shells led her to explorations of the golden spiral, which she reproduced in embroidered seaming details on a pair of slub linen trenches and on an aloe linen dress. Hearst knows that nothing is as important as the detail.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Time For Reset. Balenciaga SS21

October 5, 2020 | Design & Culture by Ed

I expected to see something truly uncomfortably intriguing from Demna Gvasalia, but his latest, spring Balenciaga collection is radical in a different way. First thing you notice: it’s all about Gvasalia’s Balenciaga classics, stripped-back and simplified. And then you get it: it’s a line-up that to the bone reflects what most of us (if not all) really feel now. We need comfort. We feel secure when invisible. We don’t want to be bothered by others. And it’s great if our turtleneck can act as a mask. You can love a gorgeous, fairy-tale dress, but deep inside, under the pressure of the cracking world, a good hoodie, a big coat, and a pair of undemanding pants make us feel safe and relaxed. So, as a sort of middle finger to the industry where some still do business as usual, trying to sell a dream, Gvasalia lets us stay in the comfort zone. But then, the collection isn’t as grey and dull as it might sound. “Hope is the last thing to die. That’s the Russian saying. You know, I couldn’t wait not to do a show. It didn’t feel right with the way things are. So we’ve made a music video,” he told Vogue in a phone call from Switzerland, where he lives. “My husband recorded that ’80s track by Corey Hart, ‘I wear my sunglasses at night’—because you know, is there anything more absurdly fashion than that? It’s also allegorical. You know, where is fashion going? It’s out there, searching in the dark at the moment, not seeing…” But wait – there is nothing dystopian about this video. Gvasalia’s tribe of Balenciaga nighttime people are each captured as if heading somewhere with a purposeful step. We see them as they walk along the Rue de Rivoli, past the Tuileries gardens, embodying exactly the inimitable cool of the type of people who turn heads after dark on the streets of Paris. We clock them, we check out their clothes, how they’ve put them together, each to their own. They feel real. They are real. Demna confesses that something has change inside of him, in midst of the lockdown. The very man who plunged his fashion show audience into a terrifyingly apocalyptic show experience last season has come back with his head in a far more optimistic place. “Because some day we will be out of this.” He imagined a man who leaves the house near the site of Cristóbal’s maison – a guy, setting out in an oversized navy suit, wraparound shades, and what looks to be a sweater draped over his head (but is a ready-made Balenciaga accessory). “So,” Gvasalia related, “he walks through the night, going through lots of changes, morphing into her, him, them. And they end up meeting as friends, going to a party or a club maybe—and everyone is without masks. That’s the hope!” Pandemic-end pending, however, the film credits meticulously set out every detail of the COVID-secure measures taken to safeguard models and crew. Moreover, the impetus of the collection was “imagining how fashion will be in 2030. When thinking of the future, it’s not a Stanley Kubrick space-age vision for me. Mine is very much down to earth. Ten years from now, everything in fashion will be sustainable. No discussion, right? I think we will be reusing the clothes we have. Time makes things beautiful. I heard a quote from Martin Margiela when I was working there, about the value of ‘the trace of time’ in clothes. That touched me deeply. We keep clothes like that to death. I mean, I have a hoodie that’s 15 years old. It’s bleached out and has holes in it. But I cannot throw that away. So, I thought: In the year 2030, how will your favorite things look, aged and destroyed?” A press release specified: “93.5% of the plain materials in this collection are either certified sustainable or upcycled. 100% of the print bases have sustainable certifications.” This speaks for itself. With the resources of the Kering Group at hand, Gvasalia said, “we discovered we could do it quite easily, with the exception of the fibers that are in some of the existing fabrics. There are solutions if you look for them. There’s a need to revise things. To start a new chapter.” So, in the end, it’s not that depressing. A reset-slash-detox brings space and lets fresh air in. Gvasalia keeps on provoking the mind, even with the simplest gestures.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Surreal Reality. Schiaparelli SS21

October 5, 2020 | Design & Culture by Ed

In a pretty short time, Daniel Roseberry has pushed Schiaparelli – a haute couture maison – forward to an extent in which its ready-to-wear line finally makes sense. Roseberry’s flair for the fantastic absolutely works with Elsa Schiaparelli’s aesthetic, and in the spring-summer 2021 line-up he manages to negotiate the balance between the Surrealism that was the legendary designer’s signature and the everyday. Speaking over Zoom, he said he approached the new collection with “a renewed energy to focus on what I want to say here, to capture the irony and what Schiap was about. Her legacy still lives really large, and it feels really true to this moment.” The pandemic has upended fashion. Some designers and brands are sitting this season out or playing it extra safe, counting on pajama sets and tracksuits to carry them through. Not Roseberry. In the look book photos he took himself (it’s interesting that many designers choose to photograph their collections), and in the behind-the-scenes video the brand produced, that extroversion comes across most distinctly in Roseberry’s fabulous gilded jewellery: eyeglasses with enamel eyes in the center, masks that cover nose and mouth, fingertip talons, and even nipple buttons. Those little and big, wearable artworks took Instagram by storm. The clothes are nearly as provocative. See: the white button-down with hand-painted breasts on the front, the odalisque prints on a shocking pink and white pantsuit (studies of Manet and Degas that Roseberry did himself), and the broderie anglaise with Surrealist faces picked out. There’s also a pair of minidresses, one ivory, the other black, with big inverted volumes. Roseberry took no half measures with this collection, and in this time of uncertainty and anxiety, that kind of conviction is a real turn-on – something we’ve experienced as well at Jonathan Anderson’s extraordinary Loewe.