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PARIS - Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson sparked a photographer frenzy at the Louis Vuitton show on Sunday, as designer Marc Jacobs took Paris fashion week to its final phase with shimmering, slim outfits.
Jacobs said his collection was a homage to Johannes Vermeer, calling the line "Girl with a monogrammed bag", a play on words on Vermeer's painting and the 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring on the Dutch painter, in which Johansson played a main character.
"I thought it was amazing," the actress told reporters after the show in a giant tent in a courtyard of the Louvre museum.
"I thought it was beautiful. And I was really happy to see how wearable everything is," she said, after Jacobs paraded out models in short leather jackets with asymmetric zips. Other girls wore A-line coats and dresses in all shades of blue.
"The colour palette was informed by paintings from Vermeer," Jacobs said after the show. "What we set out to do was to ... keep a sense of romanticism and a sense of colour but to give them a force and a strength and to keep them modern."
The Vuitton show came at the end of a fashion marathon, which has taken editors and buyers to New York, London, Milan and Paris in past weeks and featured some theatrical shows.
In Paris, designer Karl Lagerfeld let it snow paper flakes on his catwalk for Chanel. Tango dancers graced the catwalk at Kenzo, and Alexander McQueen let locusts and screaming owls move over a giant video screen at his show in a concert hall.
Voluminous coats featured on many runways, with some skinny models almost seeming to disappear underneath the wool fabrics.
"There is a wonderful sense of volume on the backs," Sally Singer, fashion news director at Vogue, said of the Paris shows. "I think there's an intelligent use of men's wear and I think that mixed prints ... will be quite strong."
Designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood brought swinging tartan coats onto their runways this week.
Whereas Gaultier said his line had been inspired by trips to London in his youth, Britain's Westwood is famed for having used British fabrics for her daring outfits for decades.
"I don't want to be insular. I want my clothes to be international, but I can't avoid my Englishness," said the 65-year old designer, who has kept her edge since her bondage-inspired creations for the Sex Pistols in the 1970s.
In her Stone Age-inspired show, she paraded out girls in large knitted cardigans and high furry hats.
The headwear at other designers was no less extravagant.
Gaultier sent his models out in crocheted hair nets, which were sometimes so large that they covered the models' faces. Girls at John Galliano's show for Christian Dior strutted down the catwalk in lamp-shade sized straw hats.
Jacobs chose berets to accompany outfits including a tight shirt with a feather necklace or high-waisted leather skirts.
Johansson said the collection had a "Hitchcockian" allure. Asked what she was wearing in daily life, the advertising face of Vuitton joked: "In my everyday life, I wear costume."
- REUTERS
