About Paris(ian Style). Louis Vuitton AW23

March 8, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.
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Horse Girl. Stella McCartney AW23

March 8, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.
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Party People. Valentino AW23

March 7, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Pierpaolo Piccioli is loosening it up lately. Less of sublime, heavenly elevations, more of party vibe. His Valentino autumn-winter 2023 collection is for party people. Maybe not ravers (with thick pockets), but definitely fans of chic soirées, ambient cocktails and events with great music. The concept for the latest collection came up quite spontaneously: when Piccioli came home from work at the Valentino office in Rome recently, he was astonished to see that his 15-year-old daughter had raided his wardrobe for a night out with her friends. “She’d taken one of my black suits, white shirt, and black tie and was on her way out the front door. It was amazing to me, because she’d never seen me wearing a suit to the office. I keep some I wear with a bow tie to things like the Met Ball and other events, but never on a daily basis.” He realized his kid had no idea about ascribing socially-conditioned ideas to the conventions of formal dressing. “It was just, she liked it, and it was a new thing to her. In the end, I think that’s the way to approach fashion, as a personal choice of freedom.” And he was off, with ideas aplenty, inspired to design his ‘Black Tie’ collection. The neo-punk tribe of people he sent stomping around the rooms of the Hotel Salomon Rothschild had face-jewelry, tattoos, and heavy boots, the better to demonstrate the individuality he wanted to spotlight amongst his reinterpretations and deconstructions of traditional formal attire. Of course, it was Yves Saint Laurent who first broke the boundaries between women’s and menswear with his evening ‘Smoking’ suits in the 1960s. At the time, Valentino Garavani was focusing much more on creating a language of femininity which attracted conventional aristocrats, Hollywood actresses, and socialites. “I always think about what Valentino was about – it was about the idea of lifestyle, the perfect life, success,” Piccioli said. “I think, now what I’m doing is more switched to the idea of the lifestyle of community, our community, communities that are about the sort of gang of kids who are saying, look, we can wear the same sort of clothes, but giving them their personality with that.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Anatomy of Tailoring. Alexander McQueen AW23

March 7, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.
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The Nipple Isn’t Freed. Ann Demeulemeester AW23

March 7, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.