Finally, a Louis Vuitton collection by Nicolas Ghesquière that doesn’t look like a cartoon. The concept for the autumn-winter 2023 collection came to Ghesquière after returning home from traveling last year, when the world was finally opening up again. “What is French style?” he said. “It’s an ambitious question, but being at Vuitton you have a certain responsibility because the name of the brand is so strong in the world.” His idea, he explained, was to ask the young designers in his studio for their takes on the subject. “Since they’re so international, I was curious to know what would they think.” Unsurprisingly, they all came back with “very different things”, which isn’t necessarily what all the ridiculous handbooks on Parisian style dictate. According to this offering, Frenchness in fashion is the Tricolore, which the studio reproduced on a blue, white, and red quilted shoulder bag, and leather gloves. It’s the Opéra Garnier, which inspired the light-up Phantom of the Opera masks. And it’s the Cinq à Sept, which is a local colloquialism for an affair, that was alluded to here with a series of sumptuous dressing gowns, pajama tops, and plush faux fur shorts. This was a collection that was in touch with the street, with a few nods to the designer’s sci-fi obsession, softer and more down-to-earth. A close-up look at the clothes revealed intriguing details: the camel coat in look 14 may appear to be wool, but it’s actually leather, first embossed, then printed. The jewellery was inspired by musical instruments (the trumpet brooches are too good!). Also very desirable: a finely embroidered slip dress worn with a chunky hand-knit scarf thrown over the shoulder and boots. Asked if he came to a conclusion about French style, Ghesquière shook his head. “No. Every season we try to answer that question, but without saying it. This season the difference is we own it. But French style belongs to everyone.”
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Stella McCartney‘s autumn-winter 2023 collection was all about her long-time obsession and passion for horses. Judging from the models’ calmness in the runway pictures, it’s hard to believe that seven un-haltered white Camargue horses were running around the sand-strewn arena immediately to the left of the runway. They were joined by the horse whisperer Jean-François Pignon, who gently encouraged them to rear, run in circles and roll around in the sand. “There’s so much leather and feather and fur on the runway, especially in winter, and I just wanted to show that you can do it in a different way. You don’t have to kill anything,” Stella McCartney said after the show. She nailed it. McCartney is vegan, but also someone who believes in harmonious relationships between humans and animals. Her mother Linda bred Appaloosa horses, and to this day, the designer still rides. She has a horse named Summer and keeps dogs, too. Her collection was an exercise in claiming and re-appropriating the codes of the British equestrian wardrobes associated with hunting and the warhorses of the Great War, and all the things McCartney doesn’t believe in. “It’s beautiful: the tailoring, the bespoke work. As someone who studied that for many years, you can’t get away from it,” she said, reflecting on those uniforms. “The relationship between the man and the woman and the horse and nature, it’s this kind of pull-and-push, and I think there’s a poetry at the center of it all.” McCartney applied her equestrian grammar to the Y2K language of her own fashion history – the Chloé era! – which she first re-introduced last season. The fusion materialized in skimpy hussar jackets, little cropped vests, deconstructed denim suits from another equestrian culture, and low-riding trousers that infused draped hip chains with fresh tack associations. Those memories continued in dresses and knitwear that revived the horse print from her spring/summer 2001 collection for Chloé, albeit in a blurry evocation. McCartney’s ongoing rekindling with her own archives from her tenure at the house is timely – it’s what the kids want (her daughter is the best example) but it’s clearly also invigorating the designer in new ways. Everything suddenly feels a little bit more impassioned in the house of Stella.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Alexander McQueen is back on the Paris Fashion Week schedule. Last time when Sarah Burton presented her fashion show in the city, Europe was at the verge of full-scale pandemic. This season, the designer chose to remind the fashion audience about the sharpness and excellence of her tailoring, and the expression of a darkly explosive imagination that is well and alive in the McQueen ateliers in London. “It was looking at anatomy, the anatomy of tailoring,” Burton said backstage. “Almost back to the beginnings of McQueen on Savile Row. It was a progression, which starts very kind of straight and structured. And then it begins to flash and twist and turn upside down. It’s like how you begin with a garment – you have to know that there’s a way to construct it, the bones of it, before you can dissect it and subvert it.” Naomi Campbell, in a black jumpsuit with a swooping corseted bustier, led out a march of impeccable black suits, white shirts and black ties, and pinstripes cut into jackets and morphing into tailored strapless dresses. Strictness and pulled-together uniform have been surfacing as a theme this season; here, there was a precision and controlled tension of kinkiness where nothing was quite what it seemed. Burton partly put that down to having watched the stunning Cate Blanchett in the Oscar-nominated film TÁR: “That part where you see the tailors making their chalk-marks on the cloth.” The broken lines she had woven into the pinstripes vibed on that process. Her idea about dressing and studying the body led her to the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Once you knew that, the peeled-back sections of knitwear dresses, incised on the hips, took on a new, sinister context. Surreptitious references to blood and guts were transformed and sublimated into asymmetric frills and prints which looked like giant orchids at some points, and drawings of dissected cadavers at others. In calling up the past and reconnecting with the earliest days she’d worked with McQueen, Sarah Burton projected this collection right into the here and now. It had drama and strength, and many options for all genders to dress very differently than the over-blown theatrical costume that has passed for event-wear these past few years.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Ludovic De Saint Sernin as the creative director at Ann Demeulemeester: this sentence still surprises. The Antwerp-based brand – and its founder – affiliate with a certain depth, as evocative and raw as Patti Smith’s poetry and music; it’s about a humble crisp white shirt so well-tailored it will serve you for years; her brand used to be the epitome of sensuality that was mysterious, fluid and in a way ephemeral, blink-and-you-will-miss-it. Ludovic De Saint Sernin, meanwhile, judging on his Parisian namesake label of hyper-sexualizing clothing, isn’t really about those elusive notions. His debut collection for the Belgian house seemed to check all the boxes of the preconceived image Demeulemeester has in the mind of general public: long floor-sweeping lenghts, boy-ish black suits, a dark colour palette with drops of maroon. What certainly felt like an ambiguous idea was De Saint Sernin’s choice of covering female models’ breasts. With an exaggerately big feather (another Demeulemeester code), with a shearling capelet, or with hands. The brand’s founder, who through clothes celebrated women’s liberation and their bodies, would never censor her models. Probably, De Saint Sernin’s idea sprang from Instagram’s and TikTok’s disturbing, AI-generated anti-nipple policy (being applied to women only – because men’s nipples appear to be absolutely acceptable, and ironically, De Saint Sernin didn’t cover them in his menswear looks…), which is a topic for a whole another post. And here’s the problem: Ann Demeulemeester, the designer, wouldn’t seek approval from such thing as Instagram, while Ludovic De Saint Sernin’s vision of sexuality is conceived for that specific platform. The autumn-winter 2023 clothes weren’t bad – they might even sell well – but they weren’t an innovative take on Demeulemeester’s design legacy. Except for a couple of Ludovic-look-a-like models (this designer has a certain level of heavy narcissism about him), you wouldn’t be able to distinguish this line-up from what the brand had in offer for the past couple of studio-designed seasons.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
After THE controversy – which became an unprecedented case study that polarized the fashion industry – that escalated in the second half of December and continued to be dynamically scrutinized in the beginning of 2023, Balenciaga and Demna are back. Cautiously. The autumn-winter 2023 fashion show was provocation-free: just a white-cube venue and models in clothes, with no sociopolitical context playing in the background or a performative, highly-viral shock value. Stripping back to the fundamentals of design has been a thrust of this latest round of shows, but nowhere was the extreme tension between those two poles felt more sharply than at this show. Demna’s explanation and apology, with information about the brand’s plans for internal reform and its offer of reparation through a three-year partnership with the National Children’s Alliance was published by Vogue in early February. “I needed to have a show because I need to move on. I need to liberate myself – through my work, and what I do, and put it out there,” he’d said in a one-on-one conversation held at Balenciaga headquarters in the days before the show. “Because it has been a hell three months, and I really don’t know how I had the strength in me, mentally, to go through it.”
The choice he made was to ditch his mega-set methodology and showcase his personal bid for reputational integrity as a designer. “It had overshadowed the collections – most people didn’t see the clothes even when it was packed with great clothes. You know, I just felt almost like [I was] betraying that by doing those kinds of set designs, because the most important thing for me in my work was being overshadowed by 15 minutes of buzzy concept. I was like, I was like, ‘Okay, I need to change that anyway,’” he said. “And this whole situation really just confirmed to me that it cannot be about that anymore. I love doing that. But I don’t love doing that more than making clothes and I felt like I needed to put this in focus. It came together with something that truly represents me as a designer. I feel like this is the message I want to give: This is who I am.” Who he is, and where he is now: it was hard not to read the imagery of a world turned upside down in the makings of the long, somber sequence of 17 black oversized tailoring looks that opened the show. Black is a Balenciaga core non-shade; it syncs with the mood of fashion at large, and it was a reminder that Demna was, after all, the progenitor of the super-sizing that’s swept fashion in the last decade. Nothing new there. What was different: all these pieces were constructed from reverse-tailored trousers. There were coats and jackets with pant-loops and pockets in the hems. And below them hung doubled pairs of trousers, giving, from the side, the surreal illusion that the people were walking on four legs. In the next part of the collection, Demna refocused on Cristóbal Balenciaga’s legacy. “Evolving it is the number one reason why I am here,” as he’d commented to Vogue earlier. Shorn of distractions, critically, the collection could be seen as a hybrid of Demna-isms – cyber-avatar menswear, his familiar flower-printed knife-pleated dresses – segueing into more of a distinct homage to the founder’s archival evening gowns. These were long, slim, covered-up dresses, minutely embellished, and with a new signature rounded-bump of a shoulderline. Aside from the styling, there is one far more radical change on the way for Balenciaga. It was heralded only by its absence – the fact that the clothes and accessories were wiped clean of logos. The attraction of highly visible branding has been part and parcel of the cult of Balenciaga that Demna has brought to popular street culture everywhere. “It’s a big thing,” he admitted. “But I think we’re going to enter the stage in my work where it doesn’t need to be justified by the brand on it. To be honest, it’s necessary, and I use this opportunity now to convince that this is the right thing to do. And of course, you know, doing that means not doing it only once. You have to persist to be able to change.”
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
