Dior
“Who’s that girl?” was the question on everyone’s lips, mainly because they were lost for words about clothes. The girl was Susanna Venegas, a member of the Dior design team who at the end of the show popped up on the catwalk with Bill Gaytten, the head of the studio and a longstanding member of John Galliano’s team.
They smiled, they looked nice, you had to feel sorry for them. They tried to emulate their fallen leader but came about as close to the spirit of Dior as a dressmaker in Kowloon might. This was a bum gig.
You can tell when a show hasn’t gone quite as well as the designer might have hoped because the entire audience tries not to catch anyone else’s eye, especially if that someone has a film crew in tow and is waiting for insta-opinions. Since every other journalist, blogger and socialite is also their own film crew these days, exiting a show now entails figuring out which exit everyone will make for — and heading to the opposite one, at full speed, head down, mobile phone clamped to ear.
One novice still managed to get caught out. After a few moments of agonised indecision, he came up with one of the most damning sentences in fashion (apart from “the video’s gone viral”): “It was nice.”
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Stephane Rolland
The tragic truncation of Cheryl Cole’s American Journey means that Stephane Rolland’s No 1 ambassador is no longer available to showcase his dramatic gowns (think understated minimalism, then add cleavage, lamé and the Niagara Falls of all ruffles) to a waiting US. Merde. It’s not easy setting up a new couture house when all around are shuttering theirs, and Chereel was the right girl at the right time until the dastardly/ fearless Cowell sabotaged/selflessly tried to save her career.
But life goes on and the swashbuckling Rolland has now enlisted the stately-but-slightly-scary octogenarian supermodel Carmen Dell’Orefice to lend some dignified glamour to his front row, which gathered round the smouldering remains of yesterday. Although judging by his hair, which shows signs of paying silent homage to Chereel, Rolland is not ruling out future collaborations with Cole. He loves to mix rock and royals, as two of his regulars, Queen Rania and Rihanna, prove. Cole and Carmen would round out the alliteration nicely.
Hussein Chalayan
Deep down, admitted Hussein Chalayan MBE, he didn’t really like crystals: “I would never have touched them because it’s not really the kind of thing that interests me.” So far, so loveably off-message, given that this was at the opening of an exhibition at la Musée des Arts Decoratifs celebrating his preconception-defying fusion of technology and fashion — sponsored by Swarovski.
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He did later concede that the company’s groundbreaking product design had won him round. Excellent call. With Swarovski’s input, he’s gradually morphing into the Professor Brian Cox of fashion, creating jewelled dresses that shift shape into different silhouettes from the Twenties and Thirties, persuading shafts of crystal-generated light to hula-hoop around his models’ bodies and incorporating a control panel into a fibreglass dress.
They don’t do that at Primark.
Giambattista Valli
It is the official lot of every designer who does a halfway decent show to become the subject of Taking Over Dior rumours, which is precisely what happened on Monday after Valli’s oestrogen-and-pollen fuelled homage to flowers and femininity (above). Watching all those organza tulip heads dancing across ladylike-length (ie, to-the-knee) skirts and jackets in coral, white or black in the stifling heat of an airless Paris cave had a similarly woozy effect on the cerebral cortex to knocking back antihistamine tablets with two bottles of champagne (so rumour has it).
From nowhere, you found yourself wanting to be a woman who wafts through life in featherweight blush pink chiffon and feather-tufted white coats because the models looked so very pretty — even the ones with grosgrain bandages in their hair. For the record, these clothes are a snip by couture standards, since they’re demi-couture (you can buy them in some shops). We’re probably talking no more than £10,000.
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More brilliant still was the model carrying The Ultimate Handbag: a bronze-y handle with no actual bag attached. How light, how conceptual — or maybe that’s the antihistamine kicking in and it was just a handle.
The Love Ball
One of the toughest assignments facing the couture crowd this week is what to wear to Natalia Vodianova’s Naked Heart Foundation Love Ball at Valentino’s many-acred stately château tonight. The dress code is white and long, which is amusing if you’ve just been piloted in from your yacht, less so if you’re having to work with a small, Eurostar-friendly suitcase.
But enough: this is about charity, not clothes.
Right, back to what everyone will be wearing. Vodianova has already had a dress rehearsal, having posed in 40 pictures by super snapper Paolo Roversi to be auctioned on the night. Quit it, Vod. You may have escaped Grinding Poverty (© Hello!) in Russia, modelled for Calvin Klein at 18, married English aristocracy, knocked out three kids between French Vogue shoots, parted from your husband and built 54 playparks in 38 Russian cities. But now it’s time for you to get off your skinny ass and do something — like designing a long white dress collection that doesn’t make every other woman look fat, pale, crumpled or Ku Klux Klanny.
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Armani Privé
Whenever the words “Japan” and “fashion” collide, the results usually make for a 9 on the Richter scale of disasters. Not this time. Armani handled his source material delicately, drawing on its minimalism but ladling on a fragile lushness with just-peeked printed silk prints and linings. True, the models couldn’t do much more than hobble in their narrow velvet skirts, but presumably the hem straps will be removed for customers. Then again, perhaps not, in which case hobbling will be in next season. This was his best show in decades (is he free to do Dior?).
Meanwhile, Philip Treacy showed what he should have made for Princess Bea with beautifully simple-looking giant raffia bows. How did he find working with the famously exacting Armani? “Perfect. We never met.”
The Kates
Most designers would be delirious with happiness at luring Cate Blanchett on to their front row. Armani not only got Cate, who was working a serious, grand dame American broadcaster-style do, in the vein of Katie Couric, he also scored Katie Holmes. And Katie Holmes’s hair, which was definitely channelling Kate Middleton’s.That’s a lot of Kates.
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Chanel
Much as we’d love to bring you a comprehensive bulletin from the Chanel trenches, we can’t. That’s because this is a newspaper, with deadlines. The Chanel show wasn’t even scheduled to start until 10pm last night. That’s because Karl Lagerfeld wanted to show beneath the stars instead of merely in front of them . And because he’s Karl, he can.
Alexis Mabille
Arising from his white, pouffe-shaped bed each morning, the suave Mabille has but one mission: to find a way to incorporate a bow into his next work.
Bows are his signature. They feature in every single item of clothing he’s done. Or almost. When he worked for the famously restrained Hedi Slimane at Dior he had to cool it on the bows. But now that he’s at his very own couture house he can let rip.
You’d think this might be disastrous. But as Monday’s show proved, the bow obsession (or “signature”, as it’s known in fashion speak) is good displacement therapy. Figuring out exactly where to position it, whether to half-conceal it or merely refer to it in an abstract, shadowy sort of way, occupies so much of Mabille’s time these days that he keeps everything else admirably pared-back.
Rabih Kayrouz
Strictly speaking, Kayrouz’s less-is-more aesthetic is not couture. It’s not autumn/winter either, but spring/summer. Confused? Join the rest of the fashion world, where there are now so many different collections you can wear something that’s technically from 2012 and call it vintage because it’s been seen on every celebrity. Still, this was beautiful however you categorised it: architectural slices of white, grey, navy or acid-yellow silks, brushed cottons and petal-soft leather cut to graze the body rather than throttle it. But you’ll have to fly over water to Bergdorf Goodman to buy it as British stores haven’t caught on yet. What are they waiting for?