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.

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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.

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Futurism. Fendi SS24 Couture

January 26, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

“I wanted the collection to feel quite graphic rather than romantic because I was thinking about Fendi and how, under Karl, there was always an element of ‘futurism,’” Kim Jones said of his latest haute couture collection. “I didn’t go back to look at what Karl did, but I like to take the essence of it.” This couture collection landed especially well, because Jones didn’t base his concept on a specific Karl Lagerfeld collection that much. This was finally a Jones for Fendi collection, not a dig into the archives. The designer developed trompe l’oeil decorativeness of an unexpected kind, which appeared to be one of the biggest highlight from this very streamlined, sharp collection. “We wanted to do fur, but without using fur or fake fur,” he said. “So we’ve done it with embroidery instead.” Embroidered with miniscule filaments, and sewn in densely overlapping rippling formations, the results are feather-like and feather-light to wear, be it as a coat, dress, or pencil-skirt. There’s also something for the couture-minimalists: the opening look was as spare and reduced as could be, specifically a black, strapless calf-length column Jones called “a box-dress.”

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Crescendo. Valentino SS24 Couture

January 26, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

For spring-summer 2024 haute couture, Valentino‘s Pierpaolo Piccioli opted for the hushed intimacy of its salons on Place Vendôme. The designer’s aim was to emphasize the “sacred process” of couture. But there was nothing quiet about the presented haute garments; this was a full-tempoed crescendo from the first look till the finale. Piccioli’s lineup included the requisite red carpet stunners, but also indulged in a quirky day wardrobe in unusual volumes and colors. Oversize jackets, palazzo pants, scooped vests, fishtail skirts and duster coats came in shades like chartreuse, oxblood, lime, putty, mustard and sage. The designer skipped elaborate embroideries, focusing on silhouettes that require the highest skills of tailoring (and artisan) precision. Small oblong discs were bonded with patent leather to resemble crocodile skin on a glossy green men’s coat, while a barely there chiffon top sprouted tiny white feathers that were actually made from cut organza. “The magic comes from the illusion,” Piccioli said. With 64 sublime looks, the collection offered a dizzying array of options for awards season, including a stunning black velvet cutout dress trailing a long silk chiffon stole.

Piccioli noted that each piece that comes out of his workshop is unique, since no two people execute his sketches the same way – and that’s just how he likes it. “If you don’t project your own experience, your own life, your humanity into what you’re doing, you will never feel the soul,” he said.

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