Collection Reviews
Elegant, chic and ultrasexy are all words Elie Saab is well-versed in. While each could describe the numerous red-carpet-ready dresses with pretty embellishments that the designer showed for fall, it was his continued step up in daywear that was most noteworthy — this time with a pleasant mix focused on solid colors.
Many such day dresses came sculpted to the body with a zipper down the back; others featured a structured bodice and a full skirt just above the knee. The silhouettes were quite sophisticated and are sure to please his loyal consumer set.
Somewhat buried in the collection were two unexpected looks: a black sweater-skirt combo in a matching moody blue floral pattern, and a capelike coat over top over ultraskinny pants, all in black. Clearly more casual, they didn’t quite mesh with the rest of the lineup, yet provided a glimpse into just how willing Saab is to push his day look with a younger vibe. It was a refreshing move and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the future.
Miuccia Prada is typically less outspoken about the fashion fatigue induced by producing two major collections per season than, say, her pal Marc Jacobs, who has taken to wearing his pajamas around town — at Miu Miu, he was still sporting the ones in which he took his Vuitton bow.
But even Prada is not immune to the grind. When prompted for the requisite inspiration sound bite after the show, the designer began by saying that her phenomenal Prada collection ate into her mental space for Miu Miu. “After the last show, having worked so much for a month and a half [on Prada], I just wanted the visual,” she said. “Something sporty but it had to become frivolous and romantic at the end. The end is completely another story, but I didn’t have time to analyze it. It’s just instinct and what you see.”
If she was pressed for time or drained of creative energy, it didn’t show on the runway, where impulse drove her to a great, new-for-Miu Miu silhouette of long coats and sweaters worn over longer skirts that revealed the ankle.
The look seemed rooted in conservative, early 1900s nostalgia, on which Prada riffed with deft mix of serious fashion and cartoon madness. One ensemble — a fitted black jacket with big round buttons and orange astrakhan collar, worn over a polka-dot skirt with an orange ostrich carpet bag and silver Mary Janes — brought to mind Mary Poppins.
The outerwear/skirt pairings, which went on to include terrific clingy ribbed knits zipped over striped skirts in combinations of red-and-black or yellow-and-black, triggered a memory of Jean Paul Gaultier in the Eighties.
But there was plenty of Prada’s own history, too, in the sporty jackets and belted bodices cut out of quilted navy blue nylon with pronounced zippers, big pockets and ribbed knit cuffs and hems. The adorably clownish motifs that were used sparingly as styling effects at first, escalated to full looks by the finale of chicly cut coats in pink, yellow and baby blue.
There’s grunge and there’s grunge. Deep into his contract negotiations with Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs chose to revisit the theme
Hallelujah! That word applies not just to the ecclesiastical motif of Sarah Burton’s exquisite Alexander McQueen presentation
Intimacy and desire are often Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli’s key talking points when discussing their designs for Valentino.
Many aspire; few achieve. World domination, that is. The living legend of Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel continues to grow
It might sound strange in a week when the Kim & Kanye circus hit Paris, and when Cher turned up on the front row at Gareth Pugh, but it’s only when the build up to the Saint Laurent presentation mounts that you realise the live streams and image galleries and Tweets you’ve been scrolling are starting to feel like a reality show.
The dramas and disasters, surges of frantic excitement and simmering feuds and epic cliffhangers. And in the midst of it all, the increasingly solitary figure of Hedi Slimane; helming a vision that the world at large seems to regard with either utter bewilderment or all-out adoration. Team Hedi, Team Yves; vote now. Lines close at the end of the show.
A week after his menswear show in January – a show that had been intensely awaited, and frantically pulled apart, and then quickly forgotten – I saw a teenager on the streets in Soho wearing circulation-stopping drainpipe jeans, and a shaggy shearling overcoat, and Cuban heels, and a thickly wound leopard-print scarf. Two streets on, there was another one; scruffy, grown-out hair, and a vast knitted cardigan over those same jeans. And further along again, in Covent Garden, two others. It was the kind of worn-out, moody post-grunge uniform people have worn in London for years, in the bleary bars and clubs of Camden and Shoreditch.
But the aesthetic was shockingly, specifically, exact – still fresh from the runway.
When Saint Laurent (with a Y) started Rive Gauche back in the mid-sixties, it was intended both as a way of disseminating fashion’s out-of-reach extremes to the masses, and as a means of catering to a youth market which had just begun to explode. And it was meant to be one-way traffic: preserving the ivory tower, but reaping an entirely separate gold-rush. But instead it became a conduit that allowed streetwear and high fashion to mingle and infect each other with their wildly different energies.
That disappeared over the decades, as the house returned to it’s early hauteur; a determinedly sophisticated sensibility continued by Ford and Pilati (prefacing the route so many Paris fashion houses have taken, gradually retracting back to their couture roots). And maybe that’s the fundamental not-so-mysterious mystery of why Slimane is doing what he is doing at Saint Laurent now; an attempt to reach out and grasp something outside of a world of self-reference, and to create a kind of fashion which reflecting reality – or at the least, a part of it – back at itself.
