Vanessa Friedman reflects on the key takeaways of fashion month. The fashion critic considers the role of the archive and how some designers are embracing the nonsensical.
The Miu Miu show on the last day of fashion month opened with an art installation – Art Basel Paris starts in about
Titled “Salt Looks Like Sugar,” it transformed the runway space into a newspaper printing plant, with issues of a tabloid called The Truthless Times hanging from conveyor belts that ran across the ceiling as videos of two employees played on the walls. All to illustrate the ambiguity of what a precis called a “post-truth era” and issues like: What is fact? What is fiction? What is fashion?
OK, not the latter. That wasn’t part of the piece. But it could have been.
The question of what style is going to look like next is always the underlying theme of collections, as is a certain breast-beating about the bubblelike point of it all, but rarely have there been as few answers as there have been over the past few weeks. Instead there’s been a lot of spinning in place, archive-diving (when in doubt, look to the past!) and breath-holding. A lot of big shows and big celebrities, signifying … not much.
You can understand it, in the case of a brand like Chanel, which is between artistic directors and currently being created by the design team. The brand is literally in limbo, so defaulting to the known – jolie madame bouclé skirt suits in black and white, flowing floral chiffons – makes sense.
Especially when dressed up by a command performance from Riley Keough, a house ambassador, who serenaded the crowd with a rendition of When Doves Cry while swinging in a giant birdcage, a nod to Vanessa Paradis’ famous 1991 Chanel ad. But even more broadly speaking, when no one knows what is going to happen next, it’s hard to predict how to dress next.
Which is why it was so interesting to see both Miuccia Prada at Miu Miu and Nicolas Ghesquière of Louis Vuitton come up with the same solution, just at the closing bell: Don’t worry about it. Instead, embrace it. Turn the confusion and the mess to your own advantage.
Turn it into a look.
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Advertise with NZME.Not that their actual looks were the same; it was the underlying principles. As Prada said after her show, the point is to take all these different realities (or surrealities) and smash them together. The tension inherent in women’s lives – the push-pull between substance and frivolity, responsibility and dreams, sex and maternity and strength, and so on – has become the creative happy place of her Miu Miu.
This time around that meant juxtaposing elements of athleticwear, like cutout maillots and nylon track jackets, with delicate white cotton pieces, almost like nightgowns from a midcentury Provençal town in France that, in turn, came sprinkled with sparkling ‘70s graphics and floral bouquets. It meant multiple bejewelled and Western belts draped over what looked like antiseptic nurse uniforms.
Also bras with the straps hanging down to create a little bit of a ruffle spilling over the top of a knit sweater wrapped tightly around the torso like a bustier (a styling trick that should take off), and tight polo shirts with full skirts. The backs of some dresses were left gaping open and undone, because if there’s no one there to button you up – who cares? Why not turn it into a virtue. (“Why not?” could be Prada’s mantra.) Hilary Swank in a brown leather skirt suit and Willem Dafoe in a blue overcoat popped up on the runway. Surprise!
Her point wasn’t to resolve dichotomies but to exploit them. Just as Ghesquière’s combination of structure and softness, Renaissance volumes and references and modern athleisure, was meant as both a continuation of the time-travelling aesthetic he has made his signature at Louis Vuitton and a celebration of the oxymoron. Terrible beauty and all that.
He went so far, he said in a preview, as to ask his tailoring atelier to work on the more flowing pieces and his flou atelier to work on tailoring.
“It was a game of diplomacy, you can imagine,” he said, semi-rolling his eyes.
The result, set on an LV-trunk brick road/runway, was initially jarring, and then weirdly compelling, like most of Ghesquière’s work. Pouffy 16th-century jackets with courtier sleeves and silver embroideries were worn with striped biker shorts. Little silk dresses in graphic prints came layered under even smaller sheer strapless numbers crusted with cabochon gems.
There were a lot of breeches and bloomers in velvet and pleated chiffon beneath ornate ‘80s power shirting, and ropes of necklaces were draped over almost everything. The vibe was teeth-clenchingly rich meets mall casual. Some shoes were covered in fabric petals, so they resembled big floral mops.
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Along with the bloomers, fuzzy, life-raft shoes have turned into one of the weirder trends of the season – also present in Chitose Abe’s masterful deconstruction of French archetypes at Sacai, where they took the form of shaggy, feathery slippers. Though when it comes to inexplicable fashion phenomena, nothing tops the one-leg pant, which first appeared in Milan just over a week ago. Ghesquière made some of those too, paired with funnel-shape flying saucer tunics on top. They looked sort of like trousers that had gotten snagged on a hook on the way out the door, and in the rush to get going, half had ripped right off.
The embrace of the seemingly nonsensical combination, worn with aplomb, is the best idea of the month, a takeaway you can actually replicate at home, whether you ever end up wearing any of these clothes or not. But the one-leg pant is just, well, a step too far.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vanessa Friedman
Photographs by: Simbarashe Cha
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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