When Jean Paul Gaultier announced Simone Rocha as the guest designer for the spring-summer 2024 haute couture collection, it was clear that this unexpected match would result in an intriguing dialogue between Parisian artisanship and the Irish designer’s idiosyncratic take on femininity. The way Rocha interpreted the iconic JPG cone-bra into thorn-shaped protrusions signaled that she, unlike the previous guest creatives, will take a closer look at the couturier’s interest in the female body. This took her to the idea of playing with contrasts of couture: the tension between restraint and fragility. “His love of the breast and the hip and the female form – exploring that and harnessing it,” the designer said, explaining all the skirts and gowns buffeted with crinoline panniers and bustles. Corseting, another Gaultier landmark signature, seemed to be Rocha’s favorite element to play with. The designer treated the corset “as a security and this kind of second skin on the body.” The tattoo prints earned certain pagan mysticism in her hands, something I always love about her London shows. Meanwhile Breton stripes were represented by navy ribbons tied into bows and tacked loosely to illusion tulle, which also appeared on offbeat padded underpants. This was definitely a noteworthy fashion experiment to unpack.
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“He met Margaret on a rooftop, she was wearin’ white,
And he was like, ‘I might be in trouble'”.
Of course, the moment I saw Margaret Qualley stepping out on the Chanelhaute couture runway dressed in all-white, I had this Lana Del Rey song on my mind. Dedicated to Jack Antonoff, her friend and long-time collaborator, and his wife, Margaret, the song is an ode to hope and love, and finding answers for big questions in the right time. This Virginie Viard couture line-up, very unfairly hated by most of the critics, encapsulated that mood very well, and was yet another endeavor into a sort of unhinged femininity that isn’t exactly what the mass media keep on expecting from her Chanel. Largely inspired by ballet and the zsa zsa zsou feeling of falling in love, the collection ran from white to fondant pastels and back again. The connection to dance was flickering through the silhouette of a tweed twinset of sorts – a cropped jacket whose matching under-piece was shaped like a leotard. Other highlight: a nipped-waist, full-skirted black coat-dress puffed out on a stiff white ballerina tutu. Then, a pink chiffon dress with a shirred bodice and flyaway, textile-arty bows mixed up in its skirts. The Chanel woman is a girl at heart, but not definitely not because of a TikTok trend, but in a Sofia Coppola-kind-of-way. The finale, of course, was the Chanel bride. She had on a tiny silver-white tunic for a dress with poetic balloon chiffon sleeves and was trailing yards of white tulle as a train. Romantic, decorative, but grounded in a kind of contemporary reality. That’s Virginie Viard’s style all over.
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“Simplicity” and “paradox” were the two terms framing Pierpaolo Piccioli’s elevating Valentino haute couture collection, held on the grounds of the majestic Château de Chantilly. “Simplicity is complexity resolved,” the designer said at the press conference, quoting artist Constantin Brancusi, whose sculptures are the modernist epitome of absolute purity. “It’s somehow paradoxical to show in an historical site that I believe is a metaphor for status and power, a symbolism that has to be questioned and re-contextualized,” he said. Staging the défilé en plein air, out of the Château’s regal interiors, was Piccioli’s way of visually performing the metaphor of freeing the constrictions of a walled, elitist life, opening up the seclusion of privilege – Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Models – angelic and stoic – walked around one of the castle’s vast parterres à la Francaise; the catwalk sneaked around a circular bassin d’eau, leaving in the background the elegant silhouette of the 17th century manor. This was hands down one of the most spectacular moments of the couture week. One of the paradoxes of couture is that it’s a craft wrongly synonymous with heavy complexity. Piccioli believes on the contrary that the essence of couture is profoundly simple, monastic in its silhouettes. He made the case for this by showing a collection devoid of pyrotechnics, superfluous gimmicks and crowd-pleasing distractions. It was simplicity at its most masterful, a celebration of imaginative, extravagant clarity.
Draping, one of the most challenging haute couture constructions, infused the gesture-defining vertical, pure, essential silhouettes with vitality, modernity, and with the impact of the sophisticated caprice so inherent to Valentino’s aesthetic. Column dresses and tunics were treated to deceptively simple bias-cutting and soft-draping techniques, making them lean sensuously on the body; hooded capes became “mantles of modern Madonnas,” bodices with skin-baring cut-outs extended into twisted knots framing the face. What Piccioli wanted to achieve, he explained, was an effect of almost no gravity. A handsome white dress in featherlight, velvety cashmere with an asymmetrical trailing hem at the back was made on the bias with just one cut. A white tunic in heavenly soft velvet was draped in a way as “to freeze the spontaneous motion of the dress in a sort of still image.” Inventive paradoxes abounded throughout the collection, one of the most striking being the opening look on Kaia Gerber. A pair of slouchy jeans reprised from classic vintage Levi’s were actually made of silk gazar, entirely embroidered with tiny pearlescent beads dyed in 80 hues of indigo to reproduce an actual denim texture (take that, Bottega Veneta’s leather-denim!). Worn with an immaculate oversized masculine white shirt, gold flat slippers and dangling rhinestone chandelier earrings, they were a handsome example of what Piccioli called “a simply paradoxical trompe-l’oeil.” The same approach was echoed in a billowy trapeze-shaped gown, whose circular feathered ruffles were made from 500 feet of white organza. To make the feathers even more featherlight and preternaturally weightless, they were burned one by one to achieve the right quivering cadence. An apparently impossible mission, but not for the formidable Valentino atelier.
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The first part of Viktor & Rolf‘s autumn-winter 2023 couture collection nearly made me stop browsing the looks: the parade of cheesy swimsuits was ridiculous. But then the ridiculous became couture, big camp way. Instead of transforming their 30th anniversary collection into a line-up of humongous, ballooning dresses in the predictable shape of improbable Viktor & Rolf-ish birthday cakes, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren went the opposite route: undress. Catchphrases like NO or I WISH YOU WELL were extended from décolletages in 3D cubic type (a nod to their ground-breaking autumn-winter 2008 show), an apparent replacement for sleeves. Yet the show stopping icing on the birthday cake were headless mannequins donning female black tailored tuxedos, hanging onto the models’ backs, or twisting in multiple formations around their bodies as if they were desperately calling for attention and didn’t want to let go. The meaning of all this? “It’s open to imagination,” answered the designers in unison. Obviously, the V&R repertoire doesn’t include the banality of logical, reasonable explanations.
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The guest designer gigs at Jean Paul Gaultier have become one of the best moments of haute couture fashion weeks. Julien Dossena‘s take on the couturier’s legacy was definitely a triumph. (Paco) Rabanne’s creative director wanted to achieve “a feeling of characters you pass in the street in Paris,” he said. “I wanted to make all of them queens, each with a different crown.” The honor of being able to bring his interpretation to the work of a national treasure of French couture couldn’t have been more sincerely felt. “Jean Paul was the first designer I ever saw on TV when I was very young. Watching him, I understood for the first time: oh, fashion can be a job! What he did (became) infused into my cultural background in general.” Over lunch with his idol, Dossena discovered that Gaultier had known Paco Rabanne, who had recently passed away. “He asked me to make something to honor him. But I had from him this complete sense of freedom. There’s this feeling in the couture ateliers that anything can be done.”
At Rabanne, Dossena’s ability to modernize chainmail and turn it into new techniques in zillions of ways has been one of the hallmarks of his talent – that, and the slant on bohemian glamour that frequently comes through his collections. His unmistakable double-salute to Gaultier and Rabanne was to whip up a replica of the famous pointy-bra dress from Gaultier’s first collection in 1984 in silver chainmail. But the dimension of Gaultier’s work which sparked Dossena’s imagination the most was his street-observation and inclusiveness – decades before it became fashionable. “Jean Paul was really the first to treat fashion as almost sociology, watching what people wear in the street, expressing communities in his shows. Joyously mixing people together.” Dossena’s presentation of chic-ified looks included a pinstriped trouser suit and a lace dress over a pair of trompe l’oeil beaded jeans with sweeping trains. Mid-way, in a stunning moment that spoke dramatically to the beauty of human togetherness, he draped shining gold and silver swathes of chainmail to connect pairs of models – a man apparently carrying a woman’s train, and two individualistic goddess warriors, each symbolizing a different culture. There were references to Gaultier’s giant trapper hat, to the sweeping floor length coats in his “Rabbi Chic” collection, and to off-the shoulder lace he used in his “La Concierge est Dans l’Escalier” show. Dossena said he’d deeply related to Gaultier’s habit of trawling flea-markets for vintage finds – a route into developing rich techniques. Part-way, there was a dress made of Irish-crochet lace, embroidered with gold paillettes meticulously made to look vintage. There was a peach satin lingerie dress layered over black lace, a floral lace apron worn over tailoring. And just as you thought Dossena might have missed a little something of the subversive wit that got Gaultier permanently labeled the Enfant Terrible of French fashion, sure enough, there it was. Clearly glimpsed through a couple of sheer dresses, a pair of trompe l’oeil embroideries of pubic hair. Sitting in the front row, Jean Paul Gaultier raised his eyebrows and chuckled as they passed by.
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