It must have seemed like a good idea several months ago to stage Chanel’s show on the terrace of the orangerie at St-Cloud, the château on the western reaches of Paris that Louis XVI gave to Marie Antoinette – especially as Dior had taken the orangerie at Versailles for its 60th anniversary celebrations the previous night. But several months ago, no one could have predicted the steely skies and stiff breezes that would envelop Paris this summer.
There is a neat justice to this horrid weather. For years designers have delivered summer clothes to the stores in January, winter clothes in July. Now they have the temperatures to warrant them.
If the number of labels producing genuine haute couture (made-to-measure, hand-sewn clothes) has dwindled to six, couture week has been ambushed by perfume launches, jewellery presentations and ready-to-wear houses showing their cruise collections. It could legitimately be called Cruise, Bling and Pong Week.
Cruise? Until two or three years ago, this was a sub-section of fashion: mid-season collections with a summer flavour that arrive in store in November, aimed at the Florida set before they embark on the QE2. But gradually cruise has become a bigger story. A designer at Louis Vuitton told me last week: “It’s where all the real clothes go. Everything you see in this cruise collection will go into stores; everything has been designed for a specific purpose or occasion. At the same time we’re trying to make cruise reflect the mood of the catwalk shows.”
Even British labels such as Giles and Mulberry are crowding in on couture week – Mulberry with a party to celebrate the opening of a new Paris shop; Giles with his “precollection”. Roland Mouret also joined them with the launch of his new RM label. For cruise has been rebranded as “precollection” and now accounts for as much as 70 per cent of some retailers’ turnover. In other words, what you read about those headline shows in September and March has less and less to do with what arrives in the shops, while the precollections attract hardly any press attention. What a system.
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Meanwhile, back on the Olympian slopes of fashion, couture stars such as Galliano at Dior and Lagerfeld at Chanel create photo-opportunities that are transmitted around the world, even though most of the clothes shown will never see the light of day nor, for that matter (since most of them long ago gave up the pretence of doing couture for everyday life) the dark of night. But what lovely photo-opportunities they are. Galliano had his magnificent array of supermodels, brought out of retirement for this birthday Dior show, to sashay up and down the world’s longest catwalk in ever more spectacular dresses that paid homage to the super-artists who had inspired Galliano and Dior himself, from El Greco, Boldini and Renoir to Horst and Irving Penn (tellingly, there were no contemporary artists represented).
Lagerfeld, at Chanel, had his Eighties flourishes, but ironically it was the rain lashing those jewelled satin trains as they trailed through the churned-up mud that made the most memorable images – along with shots of sodden clients in the front row.
The most memorable images at Armani’s Priv? show involved fuchsia and lime green. The man who made beige a fashion statement in the Eighties has moved into colour. Before the show he talked about modernity and what it means to him. Modernity is the Holy Grail of all designers, although for Armani, like most last week, couture always comes back to a wasp waist and exaggerated hips. Still, with her flawless alabaster skin, his new muse Cate Blanchett, seated front row in a black Armani cocktail dress, should be able to make it look bang up to date.
It’s probably fair to say that Christian Lacroix is not a true modernist, given his love for the 18th and 19th centuries. This time inspiration came from Ingres and Goya: Empire-line dresses and mad, bad and dangerous-to-know long black Spanish hair (by way of Amy Winehouse). So no, not modern, but breathtaking in its lightness and audacity.
Nothing that Lacroix does, not the crazy colour combinations (eau de nil, ruby and cobalt) nor the piling on of detail (one Empire-line lace dress had two pairs of sleeves; beaded gold ones beneath silk), nor the extreme proportions (cocoons sprouting streams of marabou) should ever work. But they do, with unexpectedly lovely results. He has an artist’s eye for colour and a genius’s disdain for convention. No wonder he never quite became the commercial powerhouse of early predictions.
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Jean Paul Gaultier transported us to mythical India: no rain, but plenty of torrential fringes swishing from shoulders and sleeves endowing outfits with a questionable majorette jauntiness. Beneath all the painstaking workmanship were some beautiful pared-down velvet evening dresses, trouser suits and trenches, all tailored with that ineffable Gaultier aplomb.
At Givenchy, the latest designer, Riccardo Tischi, continues on his confusing path: one moment a skinny trouser suit of accomplished simplicity, the next a pointlessly complicated feathered jodhpur oufit that looked as though it had pirouetted straight out of a performance of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake.Tischi’s clothes are like Richard Rogers’ buildings: the cleverness and hard work is on the outside. He needs to calm down, place more trust in his considerable tailoring skills and realise that true luxury is the art of effortless-looking simplicity.