PARIS — The question of the future hangs heavy over Europe at the moment — over whether Italy will succeed in convincing Germany that European Union budgetary constraints should change; over whether Britain will leave the union; over whether former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France can make a political comeback given his current legal situation — so it is perhaps little wonder that at the start of the couture season, designers themselves were addressing the issue. It may not be clear what shape the European Union will take in 2015 and beyond, but when it comes to dressing, they have some control over the matter.
How do you reconcile the need to acknowledge and preserve your heritage while at the same time making it relevant to today? How do you honor your past while altering it (literally) to anticipate what is to come? These are not questions specific to fashion, but fashion’s answers, or at least its explorations, are as relevant as any.
It was not an accident, in other words, that Raf Simons set his Christian Dior show in a circular white construction that resembled nothing so much as a spaceship that had set down in the middle of the garden behind the Musée Rodin. The Bar jacket had landed.
Also the 1920s shift, the 18th-century frock coat, the 1970s great coat, astronaut all-in-ones, and Marie Antoinette-worthy corsets and crinolined brocade gowns. It sounds messy, but what made it both meaningful and coherent was the exploration that ran through the show, which looked at connecting the past to the future, and the future to the past.
Thus every pastel velvet or silk or astrakhan frock coat, embroidered in the traditional way with silver swirls and flowers, the first time Mr. Simons has ever so overtly and obediently played with historical dress, was paired with slouchy black trousers and a simple black T-shirt or turtleneck, the kind you might see on any urban professional. The astronaut coveralls, the sort you could imagine finding during training exercises at NASA, were embroidered in similar referential tropes. Ball gown skirts were paired with tops that had the ease of a tank, and corsets transmogrified into miniskirts.
The clothes acknowledged their place in the fashion continuum while refusing to get stuck there, not always the easiest negotiation — as was apparent in Marco Zanini’s sophomore effort at Schiaparelli, where the designer seemed too mired in the past of the brand to push beyond its boundaries. This is understandable (Schiaparelli-the-woman casts a, well, shocking fashion shadow) but the effect, despite its overblown aesthetic, was limiting.
Case in point: high-waisted trousers cut wide in the legs, boleros with shoulders jutting out like a ship’s prow and sleeves bristling with sable or multicolored lamé fringe — attention-grabbing, sure, but redolent of 1940s costume more than contemporary reality. Prints and embroideries were tongue-in-cheek (squirrels with the occasional rat; moths flittering through a host of butterflies; the pigeons of Notre-Dame) and gowns bias cut, the latter the most relatively understated and thus successful pieces in the collection, especially a marigold silk-chiffon number spotted with black three-dimensional carnations.
Before the show, Mr. Zanini said he had tried this season not to be as intimidated by history as he had been in his debut collection, but his “new language” for the brand nevertheless felt mostly like a restatement of old-fashioned sartorial phraseology.
By contrast, the Atelier Versace show could easily have been called “future tux.” (It didn’t have an official title, other than autumn/winter, so audience members were free to write their own.)
Playing with the vernacular of traditional black tie, from suiting to evening gowns, the designer Donatella Versace merged forms and functions so that nothing you thought you were looking at was exactly what it seemed.
Skirt and trouser waists were dropped to expose inner waistlines that resembled corset boning, albeit in vinyl strips over transparent tulle; jackets had asymmetric, exaggerated shoulders; long sinuous skirts split at the front and wrapped one leg to become trousers, only to merge into a short on the opposite limb; embroidered and crystal-pavéd, highly constructed strapless maillots were wrapped in acres of duchesse satin that exploded into voluminous skirts; and all of it was clasped by metallic buckles that looked straight out of classic visions of the 23rd century. (That is not a typo.) Oh, and mink was patchworked with crystal mesh, T-shirts encrusted in silver and fox grafted into vinyl and leather to create a new kind of animal not known to man, though apparently known to Ms. Versace.
The idea, the designer said in her show notes, “was to make couture modern.” In this, it may not have been entirely successful — sometimes the result was overly contorted (or distorted) — but at least she was willing to question the very nature of fashion’s building blocks. And how else can new rules be written, or old ones revised?
No comments:
Post a Comment