Reject The Rules. Balenciaga AW24 Couture

June 26, 2024June 27, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

This was Demna‘s fourth haute couture collection for Balenciaga, and his most subversive in its rejection of the formality of this exclusive, highly-elite discipline. The designer is also returning to his Vetements roots via his shaping years at Margiela, which as a result gives a collection that riffs on subcultures and plays with garment (de)construction. “I wanted to create a fusion or a tribute to my personal vocabulary as a designer, which is subcultures… but I needed to bring in that kind of equilibrium with Cristóbal, obviously, because this is couture,” he said. The first mashup combined a sculpted oversize gray tee and slouchy faded jeans engineered to look like a jacket was tied around the waist, with a saucer hat of the kind he introduced in his memorable couture debut. As the show progressed, it moved from haute lumberjack shirts and hand-painted faux merch t-shirts styled with hysterical butterfly-wings masks (an IYKYK reference to Janine Janet’s 1950s and 60s window display installations for Cristobal Balenciaga’s Avenue George V salon – which today happens to be the brand’s couture boutique and show venue) into the fancy evening silhouettes associated with couture, only they were patchworked together from denim and colorful parkas that looked like they could’ve been repurposed from Demna’s earlier collections for the house. Or he constructed them with new fabrics and techniques; one column dress was made from melted plastic shopping bags molded onto the body and a strapless number was constructed with golden aluminum foil. It seems that the designer questions couture’s preciousness and the certain, imposed obligation of using the finest materials and the most fragile decoration – a stereotypical trap that literally engulfs couture work of such designers as Thom Browne. The final look was a swirling mass of black nylon, chosen because it best evoked Cristóbal’s precious gazar. It was constructed just prior to the show, a one-off piece of “ephemeral couture” that will come with three Balenciaga staffers for its assembly for the client who buys it. Love it or hate it, Demna still has it.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Opera. Chanel AW24 Couture

June 26, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Chanel joins the ranks of designer-less brands in Paris like Givenchy and Lanvin. I can’t remember a time when the Parisian roster of houses was in such trembles of undecidedness and uncertainty. Although Chanel’s autumn-winter 2024 haute couture collection is the first after Virginie Viard’s departure, it still feels like a Virginie Viard collection, just presented not in Grand Palais, but Palais Garnier. That change of scenery is a plus. The clothes looked really fitting in these a bit more intimate corridors of the Parisian opera. The team took the show’s setting as a design cue. Vittoria Ceretti’s opening look was a sweeping opera cape in black taffeta, its ruff neckline framing her face and her hair pulled back by a grosgrain bow. At the end, Angelina Kendall played the bride in white taffeta cut along the voluminous lines of Princess Diana’s wedding dress. These pieces had whimsy and drama in equal measure. In between, the classic Chanel skirt suit was renewed in salt and pepper tweeds with tassel embroideries or fringing at the cuffs and hems, or else it was cut in vibrant jewel tones and embellished with colorful cabochon stones. A double-breasted duster coat was a fine canvas for showcasing a variegated tufted tweed with a touchable texture. Bows were a recurring motif, turning up on a bronze lace skirt and a black coatdress. It all looked pretty. But Chanel can’t just lurk with pretty clothes without a distinct creative director behind them. Maybe Hedi Slimane isn’t that bad idea after all?

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Beauty For Beauty’s Sake. Thom Browne AW24 Couture

June 25, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Beauty is pain. Too much beauty can be lethal. That’s a thought that returns to my mind every single Thom Browne show, this season especially. The New York-designer designer has two contrasting qualities: he’s both a maximalist and a comfort-zone-lover. I think we will never see him emerge from the vocabulary of regal tailoring he’s so well-known for. But the maximalist side of him makes him overthink his own style, making his most splendor-filled collections feel suffocating. Even the models walking in his corsets, voluminous, multi-layered coats and statuesque gowns seem to have problems with breathing – and moving. Since he’s doing couture in Paris, Browne is doing extremely technique-demanding, yet absolutely superfluous collections, so tedious and overburdened with embroideries, embellishments and other pretty details. Yes, it’s impressive that the entire, latest collection is made from muslin, but what of it when the overall line-up looks like a big, amorphous blur of ecru? Beauty for beauty’s sake is important in our lives, but with Thom I wish he would fuck it up a little from time to time and do something… rougher?

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Old World, Vampy Glamour. Schiaprelli AW24 Couture

June 25, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

This haute couture week started with a regal twist as Daniel Roseberry took us back in time. “I had this dream of finding a forgotten couture collection in the basement of Elsa’s country house,” he said backstage at his Schiaparelli fashion show. This is a couture label that flourished in the 1920s and ’30s. Its contemporary creative director has never seemed hemmed in by that era, but this season he made his gaze more explicit. “I wanted people to feel the collection was referencing a different time… and there was something about the ’50s that felt so fresh and simple. You’ll find homages to those silhouettes.” The show was staged in a basement – the basement of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, whose upper salons have long been used for couture shows. In the dark, chandelier-lit space Roseberry conjured something of the haute couture shows of old, with models emerging at a stately, almost reverential pace, and making eye contact with the audience. Maybe it felt stuffy and history-heavy at some moments, even archaic, but there’s an irresistible charm of that old world, vampy glamour. Who wouldn’t want to indulge in wearing the show-opening cape, with the broad shoulders of an eagle with silver lozenge embroidery arranged to look like gleaming feathered wings? Or a black party dress, with its tulle skirt in a permanent can-can kick flip exposing an underside lavishly embellished with pink rhinestones? Or spiral in some mirrored hall, covered in millefeuille circles that trimmed the arabesque hems of an hourglass dress? Couture is a dreamworld, and Roseberry has no shame about it.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Unhinged Galliano. Maison Margiela SS24 Couture

January 27, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

The moment the Maison Margiela haute couture show started, it was clear that no other collection we’ve seen this week really matters anymore. John Galliano did the most noble thing a contemporary designer can do: make people believe in fashion again. And confirm that couture is still really, really needed, because it can be the most beautiful, visually striking, inspiring and astonishing form of escapism.

In the last couple of seasons at Margiela, it was clear that Galliano is returning back to himself as a designer. But this spring-summer 2024 couture collection feels like a total release, total encapsulation of the unhinged Galliano – even not from the Dior days, but rather the early 90s shows in Paris under his own name, that stunned with theatricality, pure romanticism and casts of model so authentic you believed you’ve been transported to a different epoque. The scene: under the Pont d’Alexandre III after dark, down rain-soaked steps, with the Seine roiling alongside, a rancid Parisian nighttime joint with bare floorboards, cafe tables, dim mirrors, and a bar overflowing with spent drinks. The runway mise-en-scène suddenly turned into a living Brassai’s 1920s and ’30s portraits of the night-time underbelly of Paris’s clubs and streets. Galliano’s transferences into cutting, ultra-extreme corsetry, padded hips, erotically sheer lace dresses, and wildly imaginative hair, chiffon-masked makeup, and eerie doll-like body-modifications took a year. A year to work on a production that seamlessly mixed film – which played in the mirrors – into the scenario, showing lovers, dancers, and gangsters prowling the banks of the Seine. To make it seem that these strutting denizens, fugitives from fights, or half-dressed from sexual encounters, clutching their moon-bleached coats or scrappy cardigans around them were actually congregating from the riverside and into the club before our eyes. Through some of Galliano’s beautifully delicate hourglass dresses there was pubic hair to be seen through tulle and lace (they were merkins on underwear, but still bound to stir up a storm). Some of his indescribable techniques looked almost like walking paintings, greenish-pink watercolor nudes with blurry dabs for eyes. All the images and impressions from this show will be burned on the mind’s eye for many reasons and many years.