Art

In Between. Louis Vuitton SS21

| Design & Culture by Ed

I’m really unconvinced by this Louis Vuitton collection delivered by Nicolas Ghesquière. It just felt so clumsy and messy. Which can’t be said of the show’s venue, which nearly each season looks better than the actual clothes on Vuitton’s runway (sorry…). Interspersed among the live audience in the freshly remodeled-by-LVMH La Samaritaine department store were 360-degree cameras that allowed viewers at home to swivel in their chairs, watch models coming and going, and see who did and didn’t score a better seat. It was almost like being there. “This season is very new in every way. The conditions that we’re facing are making us think differently. We came up with the idea of different degrees of presence.” In addition to the 360-degree cameras, green screens lined the walls and, in some places, the floors of La Samaritaine. Viewers of the livestream – the third way to watch and hear the show (there were live mics) – saw footage from Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire. Beyond the ’80s-ish silhouettes that have long been a touchpoint for the designer (and I think that’s the problem!), the connection between the Wenders movie and Ghesquière’s collection, was angels, which have two wings, but no gender. “My question this season was less about one theme; it was about this zone between femininity and masculinity,” he explained. “This zone is highlighted by nonbinary people, people that are taking a lot of freedom dressing themselves as they want, and, in turn, giving a lot of freedom to all of us. I found it inspiring to explore what the items are that represent this wardrobe that is not feminine, not masculine. I wanted to zoom in on that section in between.” The show began with a look that combined a timely Vote t-shirt (his absent American friends appreciated that) and baggy pleated chino pants cinched with a thick belt. It was emblematic of a collection that felt more spontaneous and street-ready than some of Ghesquière’s more glamorous outings. Basically, the entire line-up was kept in this sporty style. I’m intrigued by Nicolas’ take on the genderless fashion hitting such bourgeois brand as Louis Vuitton, but the clothes just don’t express that to me.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Girl. Miu Miu SS21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Is Miu Miu the “old Prada” now? After Miuccia Prada‘s first Prada collection with Raf Simons, which left the audience polarised, this seems to be a good idea for Miu Miu. But them, this was a quintessentially Miu Miu outing – really, the spring-summer 2021 collection is one of the best in a while coming from the brand. Livestreamed from Milan during the last day of Paris Fashion Week, the show set imagined a cyber-spacious sports arena covered in screens with the – also livestreamed – faces of Miu Miu poster girls watching the show, including Elle Fanning, Chloé Sevigny (one of the checked tops was the original piece she wore in the brand’s ad campaign shot by Juergen Teller!), Małgorzata Szumowska, Susie Lau and other Miu faces. Opened by Lila Moss, the collection captured the accidental uniforms of young people. It’s a wardrobe suspended between the extremes of the hyper-casual and that stilted sense of formality you get from a prom photo. “Polarity. These are polar times,” as Prada said in a statement after the show. “The reason why people dress is sometimes to please, sometimes to be sexy, sometimes to be socially relevant, sometimes for a job. The way you present yourself – the clothes are important because they define you in a second. Clothes are a tool for that message,” she continued. “The first spectator of yourself is you.” The Miu Miu show read like the Euphoria generation’s guide to effortless dressing: the things you wear through the process of learning the messages Prada wanted to convey about the role of clothes in life. Prim and pristine low-riding track pants, sharp track jackets, micro skirts, and kitten-heeled tennis shoes embodied the dress codes of sports activities. Sporty blazers, little bowling jackets, neat shirts, and plaid skirts evoked school uniforms. Conceived in the teenage dreams of perfect party outfits, there were techno-fied halter-neck shell tops and oscillating techy dresses. Then, some dream prom scenarios as well, like a white dress with a draped bow on the back that curtained dramatically to the side to reveal its pink lining. Prada’s show notes talked about the institution of the fashion show as a unifying event – something she wanted to convey through her livestreamed experience. Carried by the young women on her runway, that sentiment reminded some of us of the time we fell in love with fashion shows in the first place; in our teenage bedroom, chunky laptop at hand, waiting for the first runway pictures from our favorite shows to come in.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Bold Elegance. Givenchy SS21

| Design & Culture by Ed

To be honest, except for beautiful couture moments, Clare Waight Keller’s Givenchy was a yawn. But when I heard that Matthew M. Williams is the new creative director, I was skeptical – I never understood what’s his Alyx is all about. To my surprise, his debut collection for the French maison was pretty good, closer to Riccardo Tisci’s years when the brand was a fusion of dark elegance and a fresh look at “street-wear” (I dread this word, because it got completely distorted throughout the years). During the Paris presentation (no fashion show, but a look-book), placed front and center was his new lock jewelry inspired by those hung on the bridges of Paris by tourist lovebirds, who throw the key in the Seine. “It’s no secret that I’m really into hardware, and that’s what I lay the foundation with when I start a new project. It comes into shoes, bags, clothing,” he said. Williams is also obsessed with texture – from the reptilian to the volcanic and the densely embellished – as fervently illustrated at his own label. His Givenchy debut read entirely like a morph between those codes and the black-clad elegance of the house he now inhabits. Suspended between the formal and the super casual, the devil was in the fabric treatments. There’s a twisted expensiveness about Williams’s clothes that feels good and dirty all at once. What’s interesting, Williams hadn’t worked with a particular inspiration. “I’m not a person who designs in themes. It’s very much product-focused. A lot of it is what I would wear personally,” he explained, adding he did take a trip to the archives that birthed some horn heels informed by Alexander McQueen’s era, and nods to Hubert de Givenchy evident in some rigorous tailoring. The focus on product was seemingly an unemotional process that paid off in the precision of design clearly made to be instantly coveted: mushroomed slides, politely stompy black leather boots, magnified takes on existing bags. There weren’t many logos around – which I appreciate a lot. Williams isn’t mad about them. “It’s funny that I get lumped into people expecting that I do that, which I don’t really understand because at Alyx we don’t do that either,” he noted. Instead, he wants his hardware to replace the role of logos. In fact, Williams’s vision for the Givenchy woman – “very elegant and powerful and chic” – was remarkably graphic and decorative. A transparent white coat covered in fuzzy tinsel, worn over a white laser-cut top that looked like a bustier made from ribbon, with cream trousers, was simply gagging for a scene in an early 2000s music video. This will sell well, I guess.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Craft. Gabriela Hearst SS21

| 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.

Surreal Reality. Schiaparelli SS21

| 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.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.