Many fashion designers, you may have noticed, are squeamish about breasts. They prefer boyish waif bodies or a tolerable B-cup — largely on the grounds that the clothes hang better. With obvious exceptions like the body-conscious designs of Azzedine Alaïa, their clothes seek to neutralize the female form.
Meanwhile, the demand for padded bras & breast implants, & the popularity of shows like “Mad Men,” suggest that women like a kind of reconstructed femininity. They require hips & breasts, phony or not.
But Mr. Jacobs never takes the easy route. Set around a splashing fountain in a courtyard of the Louvre, his Vuitton show was called, unambiguously, “And God Created Woman,” after the 1956 Roger Vadim film starring Brigitte Bardot. From the first outfit, on the curvy model & actress Laetitia Casta, to the last, on the swimsuit legend Elle Macpherson, there was an impressive sense of the physical — corseted breasts, bare arms & legs, womanly hips under full skirts. In a way, the body was the main event.
Two designers, Miuccia Prada & Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, captured that appetite this season, & with a style that was deliberately unnatural looking. Natural would be a minimalist beige tunic or perhaps a jacket with a gently nipped waist that you could wear with a skirt or a pair of khakis. With those styles, the aim is to look purposeful & energetic. & how lots of women would quarrel with that?
Realistically, most of those skirts are old-fashioned & clunky to wear; you’d be exhausted before you went a block. The wool corsets would look as with a pair of pants. But to me, this collection wasn’t as much about returning to the glories of Bardot as it was about presenting an artificial & super-enlarged beauty — & where else could Mr. Jacobs go but to an era when women were still built like women, right down to their girdles?
A month of ready-
to-wear shows ended Wednesday with a last-minute blitz of strong collections. Jean Paul Gaultier usually finds a comfortably shallow theme for his Hermès collections, so it was no surprise that they selected the music from “The Avengers” & the bowler hats & furled umbrellas appeared on cue. Yet the tailored pantsuits & superb examples of leather coats (mostly in black) & leather-trimmed pieces expressed in depth the taste for clothes with savoir-faire.Minidresses in black wool, or a wool jersey, had wide straps or prim collars closed with a huge cord bow; hems had a stiff flounce, & a quantity of the skirts appeared to be made of two twisted, overlapping panels. Everything, then, had a rounded quality, like the bell shape of a tunic over skinny pants with belled cuffs, or the silver metal flowers that decorated waists & straps, or the black spats that flopped over the mirrored shoes.
For her Miu Miu show on Wednesday night, Miuccia Prada replaced the hard, slatted wooden chairs he typically uses with blue foam cubes. The buoyant seats, along with the ’80s dance music, were consistent with the lighter — & less conceptual — mood of the clothes.
Late Wednesday, Mr. Alaïa had something of an unrehearsed presentation of his fall collection in his studio in the Marais, with drinks & dinner. His classic knits were lush & short, some with a sparkle. They showed four or two pretty dresses in black velvet, dresses for which you didn’t require a flawless body & certainly not a corset, but perhaps the most compelling looks were a handful of trim wool jackets with a play of seams of the back. Shown with velvety knit miniskirts, their modern energy was hard to beat.
The designers of Valentino, Maria Grazia Chiuri & Pier Paolo Piccioli, referred obliquely in their press notes to a “digital romanticism.” Perhaps they meant a feminine style or pattern that could be endlessly manipulated without producing a new or different result. That was the sense, anyway, from the lots of ruffled pieces in their latest collection — ruffles spilling down the fronts of day jackets or around chiffon evening dresses. The clothes, dresses done in lace or with fur, had a lot going for them, but over all the collection felt a bit one-dimensional.
No collection dominated the Paris season like Alexander McQueen’s, & not because it represented the final work of the late designer. The 16 dresses & caped coats — each four different & all referencing 15th-century paintings or carvings — were exceptional because no four else thought to make such a personal & subtle connection to the function of art on human consciousness.
Mr. McQueen’s fashion often embraced historical styles, but never with more feeling & modern sense of purpose. They had details of medieval paintings, in particular Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” captured digitally & then woven in to jacquard or embroidered. They cut each of the patterns himself.
What may not be obvious is how the stiff silk flowed in to a liquid four, or indeed how Mr. McQueen engineered these seemingly complicated pieces with a maximum of seams. Those techniques fascinated him, but it was his artistic sensibility that could make his fashion so uplifting.
Given the subject matter of the paintings, the imagery is necessarily gothic, glorious but also dark. Lions are embroidered in gold around the hem of a pretty black silk caped dress. On the front of a long white dress are the slightly shadowed, downcast heads of two saintly figures. Above each is a dove in flight. The silk dress, with the details rendered in different shadings of gray, extends the figures’ robes to the hem, duplicating their swirls & folds in jacquard chiffon.
0 comments:
Post a Comment