Paris. Where else can you see divine evening gowns that float like chiffon clouds on one catwalk and women carrying other women as accessories on the next? Paris is the ultimate fashion capital, because it really does have it all. Every taste, proclivity and designer price point is powerfully represented here.
At Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld demonstrated the huge global reach of French fashion with a show staged on a vast set constructed as the Chanel Airlines terminal. It was the perfect backdrop for a collection designed to appeal to Chanel’s customers, whatever their age, race, region or religion. There were crystal evening jackets for Dallas charity hostesses, denim day dresses for European hipsters, knitted sweats for off-duty trophy wives and elegant chiffon dresses worn over matching trousers for the Arab clients. There were even sandals with LED lights around the soles: catnip for the street-style brigade. Where in the world would you wear them? Rome, Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo, London, New York, take your pick. Chanel Airlines flies everywhere.
Louis Vuitton also took a travel theme. Nicolas Ghesquière transported us to a digital world, playing snippets from Tron and Minecraft on his soundtrack as models wove between huge digital screens. The designer’s collection was, however, rooted in the real world. He took key elements of the modern urban wardrobe — leather biker jackets, silk jumpsuits and tractor-soled city sandals — and remastered and rebooted them. The biker, for example, was transformed with texture and colour or sliced away at the back to create waistcoats. There was plenty to excite the trend hungry, from flatform sandals and metal-tipped cowboy boots to silk biker trousers spliced with colour, worn with capelike crop tops. He even revived the most overblown 1980s evening-wear trend, the puffball skirt. It came in daytime cotton or covered in fragmented mirrors to look like a deflated disco ball. What do you wear it with? One of those killer biker jackets, of course.
Advertisement
From Stella McCartney’s easy, stripy separates, Chloé’s fine floaty dresses and Hermès’s perfectly judged baggy trousers and silk tops, Paris was strong on real clothes. Phoebe Philo at Céline gave a masterclass in great daywear, showing voluminous-sleeved blouses with slouchy trousers, coats with defined waists and fluid, fluted dresses.
And there was plenty to inspire awe, too. Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen showed her most stunning collection, mixing tough tailoring with tender frills, while Valentino blended African beading and craft techniques with the couture skills of its Roman atelier. The results, incredible meldings of leather, lace, tribal beading and embroidery, were exquisitely beautiful. The designers Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli explained after the show that their deep exploration of African craft and fabric was a response to the migrant crisis that has seen thousands of desperate Africans cross the Mediterranean to Italy, prompting an ugly backlash from some locals. “The message is tolerance and the beauty that comes out of cross-cultural expression,” said Piccioli.
There is something for everyone in Paris. If you like things a little mad and twisted, then Miu Miu’s kinky aprons and glam-rock platforms should suffice, rock chicks will lap up Saint Laurent’s slip dresses worn with festival wellies, and Margiela’s take on the geisha had a quirky elegance. If your taste leans to the avant-garde, then Hussein Chalayan’s disintegrating dresses, which fell apart as the models were showered with water, or an oversized pea-green blazer and belt-length miniskirt by the design collective Vetements will appeal. This kind of ideas-driven, convention-challenging, deconstructed fashion is on the rise in Paris. Vetements is now the insider’s favourite brand, and one member of its design team, the Georgian-born Demna Gvasalia, has just been announced as the new designer at Balenciaga. François-Henri Pinault, CEO of Kering, which owns that label, called him “a powerful emerging force in today’s creative world”. And Paris is his playground.