Bohemian. Jean Paul Gaultier AW23 Couture

July 7, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Haute Armor. Balenciaga AW23 Couture

July 6, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

With his third haute couture collection for Balenciaga, Demna reminds the industry that he continues to be a resonating force of fashion power – and gracefully highlights, why couture is still so important. “Making clothes is my armor,” the designer said. At the end of the show, staged at Balenciaga’s historical boutique-slash-atelier on Avenue George V, Eliza Douglas, walking in a shining chrome-laminated 3-D printed bell-skirted suit of armor, reminded Demna of Joan of Arc – and also of himself. “Maybe she wouldn’t have been burned at the stake for wearing men’s clothes if she was wearing that,” he remarked. “Because all my life I suffered because of what I wear.” Whatever inferences to embattlement, self-protection, and resilience might have been fleetingly caught in that conversation, his main point was that being immersed in making clothes is his happiest place. “Couture to me is specifically about clothes. There was a narrative that somehow happened by itself. It was kind of making a bridge between the past and now, which is the reason I wanted to do it from the beginning.” The collection opened with a replica black velvet Cristobal Balenciaga haute couture dress. It was worn by the equisitely elegant Danielle Slavik, who orginally modeled it for Balenciaga himself. Grace Kelly ordered it, with its integral pearl necklace, for her 4Oth birthday. Slavik had told Demna that it was her favorite dress ever. His to and fro between tradition and innovation began with his own fascination with tailoring. For a start, he probed the structure of tailoring for day. He who shot to fashion fame by making jacket shoulders humungous now made them disappear altogether, cutting wide funneled necklines into narrow women’s coats and jackets. That idea, he said, had come from turning jackets upside down. In one way, it read as a couture elevation of the suiting inversions he’d started in ready-to-wear. In another, it was surely a nod to the founder’s signature obsession with sculpting dresses to frame the beauty of his clients’ faces.

Menswear occupied an extensive section of the collection. It took in ultra rigorous black-tie formality and normal seeming business suits, right through to couture treatments of all the casual generics Demna’s been known for since day one. Menswear traditionally played no part in haute couture, it should be remembered. Silhouette-wise, with his extended-toe shoes poking out from trousers and jeans, it all appeared to be not so different from Demna’s signature ready-to-wear. In fact, he said, a slew of hidden trompe l’oeil hand-crafted techniques had been lavished on garments; there was oil-painting on fabric to imitate fur and printing on Japanese denim to mimic Prince of Wales check, as well as “windswept” raincoats and mufflers sculpted to look as if they were caught in a storm. “Because I like the couture that you see, and I like the couture that you don’t see. What’s really important is the techniques that maybe aren’t so visible. That’s a big part of who I am, and who Cristobal Balenciaga was, too. So I wanted that balance. Couture shouldn’t always be in your face, and like ‘this is a gorgeous dress.’” But there were gorgeous dresses, too. Isabelle Huppert came out in a heavily-pailletted full-skirted black dress like some gothic Infanta. Renata Litvinova’s candy-pink gown was a Balenciaga Barbie moment. There were others which, again, looked as if they’d been caught in movement; a taffeta neckline dramatically blown to one side, a slick black twist of a thing spiraled around the body. Some of it had been made in a complicity between advanced technology and the human hand, like the red lace dress that became a stiff bell-shaped filigree. All this is just as costly as anything traditionally haute couture, while being super-stimulating and truly breathtaking.

Allure. Chanel AW23 Couture

July 5, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Virginie Viard‘s autumn-winter 2023 collection for Chanel was her best haute couture moment ever. It was just so charming, effortless and simply beautiful. Inspired by a Parisian allure, the collection unveils a portrait of a delicate yet bold femininity. But the creative director also managed to present couture in a new, refreshing light. Lead by Caroline De Maigret, the models strolled nonchalantly in their block-heeled Mary Janes, just as if wearing haute couture to walk the dog or pick up some flowers at the market were most the most normal thing in the world. Showed on the riverbanks of the Seine, the garments were adorned with embroidered fruits and flowers motifs reminiscent of the still-lives dear to pictural arts. Silhouettes played with masculine codes, mixing together rigour and asymmetry, a self-confident and discreet figure. Among them was a navy flecked tweed coat dress which stood out because of its edging of pale chiffon ruffles because what you’re also craving to see at Chanel haute couture is the wonder of its savoir-faire. These techniques need to be seen close up, and explained in detail to understand the skills, the hours and the arcane refinements of the materials. At a distance, some of it did shine out across the quai: the gilded, patinated surface of a skirt suit, the 3D chiffon flowers in a dress glimpsed inside a plain coat, more flowers embroidered in multicolored sequins on the eveningwear. In the finale, a pale café-au-lait chiffon party dress was lightly whipped into ruffles at the neck and finished with a black bow – a youthful confection that could only come from the Chanel’s atelier flou.

Revenge Dressing. Alaïa SS24

July 3, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The latest Alaïa collection by Pieter Mulier is hot, sexy, F-A-S-H-I-O-N. In another words, a perfect start of haute couture week, which quite ironically happens in the midst of one of the most tumultuous moments in France’s contemporary history. Taking place over a footbridge across the Seine, the fashion show couldn’t have been more public – a strong contrast to the intimacy of Mulier’s last presentation, which he held in his own apartment in Antwerp. “For me, that’s what it is about,” he declared afterward. “It’s about extremes. You know Alaia is high heels or flats.” The bridge bristles with lovers’ padlocks bolted to its handrails. It seemed an apt environmental accessory to the unabashedly sexualized, latex and visible-thong clad vision of women Mulier was unleashing on the world. “It’s the next step in what I want to say about Alaïa,” he said. “Not fetish – that’s not a good word – but it’s personal obsessions that I wanted to do in a way that other people didn’t. Using latex, using leather in a different way. Creating a silhouette that’s very feminine, but yet quite different than what you see today.”

Kinky fashion has its own long Parisian tradition – there’s nothing new in seeing the proposal of chic bourgeois women in immaculate tailoring who also happen to be displaying underwear. These male-gaze luxury fashion tropes have a 50-year history that goes back as far as Yves Saint Laurent and Helmut Newton. The 21st-century set of questions for Mulier center more on how to handle the empathetic argument that Alaïa always made for glorifying the physicality of womanhood; how to claim it as his own, and make it relevant in his own time. Indeed ‘time’ was the overarching theme Mulier was talking about—in the sense of the time it had taken to mould and tailor the silhouettes and add obsessive details, “like 35 buttons on a coat.” You could see the time-consuming techniques lavished, say, on the opaque-sheer splicing of horizontal bands of strips of leather and gauzy fabric, winding in varying widths down a floor-length dress. The tailoring was nipped to the narrowest of pencil skirts; the taut knitwear engineered to expose the thonged bodysuits that are, of course, Alaïa-central. If you’re looking for a revenge wardrobe, Mulier has it sorted out for you.

A Feeling. Bode SS24

June 30, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Whether Emily Adams Bode Aujla shows her collections on a runway in Paris or as a lookbook, the New York-based designer always manages to capture a true feeling, a notion of a fleeting moment. For spring-summer 2024, Bode seeks inspiration in the Crane Estate, the residence in Massachusetts owned by an eccentric 90-year-old woman where her mother worked back in 1976. This appeared to be a perfect backdrop for Emily’s recently found obsession. Since her wedding last year, the designer is interested in investigating eveningwear. “It’s something that I’ve become quite passionate about because it’s really picked up for us,” she said. It’s evident in menswear pieces like the translucent-and-black all-over-sequin-embellished jacket, the navy blue suit with goldenrod crochet embroidery, and the white suit worn with a gorgeous blue and white striped pajama top with frog closures (you can also get the matching pants). It’s also apparent in pieces from her nascent womenswear line, like the sheer green dropped-waist dress studded with seed beads and the cream brocade midi-length jacket with three oversized satin bows for a closure. She called it a wedding jacket. “I love this idea,” Bode Aujla said. “I didn’t get to wear a vintage jacket like this for my wedding, but I thought that’s what I would wear. In my head, after the ceremony, this is what you put on; or maybe it’s worn at the courthouse wedding.” She continued, “Or you could wear this with black tuxedo trousers and have a really elevated evening look that’s not a dress. I could easily put that in men’s, but I think I wanted this and I think our girl wants this.” Although women have been buying and wearing Bode since the beginning, womenswear officially debuted last season in Paris. Those who expected it to look exactly like the menswear but with a slightly different fit were in for a surprise; the range is decidedly sexy. This came across in the knit panties and matching T-shirts, tanks, and bralettes; in dusty blue crochet dresses, and in the thin-as-air fish-print printed caftans. The designer added, “people commented about this on our runway show too. A lot of people expected it to be one way, and it’s like, the Bode woman compliments the Bode guy, she is not the Bode guy.”