How escapist should fashion be?
By Rachel Tashjian, CNN
Paris (CNN) — “Stop this world, let me off,” the blues musician Mose Allison once crooned – a relatable sentiment when war has broken out, inequality is top of mind and a general darkness hovers over almost all things.
Allison never intoned just which stop he’d like to get off on – but one imagines that Paris Fashion Week, where many of the shows this past week have been wackadoo with lovely, at times ditzy and always customer-pleasing prettiness, would make for a nice layover en route to something more permanent. Crises erupt across the world with alarming regularity, and yet the biannual fashion shows press on. Designers conceive of collections months (okay, at least weeks) in advance of their show dates, giving them little time to readjust to the outside world. Most keep calm and create a compelling-enough distraction as if fulfilling marching orders, their escapism a duty.
For proof of why such persistence is good, look to Dior, the second women’s ready-to-wear collection from still-fresh creative director Jonathan Anderson. Staged outdoors on a stage hovering above a pond of faux lily pads, his heaps of scalloped fabric under soft bar jackets in glorious colors, feather trimmed dresses and shoes like precious candies, made for the rare show that united the opinions of wealthy shoppers, online commentators and the prickly fashion crowd craning arms to snap pics in the room.
Some of Anderson’s early Dior efforts have been too conservative, lacking the bite that made him a hero during his decade designing at Spanish label Loewe. His best shows, like this one, feel bigger than products –– they’re layered with enough feelings that an audience can sense there’s something for them to take away that isn’t just buying something. Here, it was a pop gauntlet thrown down to say that that easiest look, prettiness, can be something beyond insipid bows and flowers and instead technically, materially spectacular.
Because the truth is that pretty, maybe more than anything else, makes you want to buy, and that’s what this luxury industry, in its topsy-turvy state, needs. Chanel, the season’s other major anchor, is surely basking in this reality: before its Monday show, it was all over social media in the form of ravenous women unpacking their “hauls” from the Rue Cambon store, where artistic director of fashion activities Matthieu Blazy’s first pieces have just arrived.
Clearly Blazy is doing things right, but if that weren’t enough, his show was pretty overload: a panoply of the classic Chanel skirt suit dazzled out of its bourgeois stiffness and dreamed up in pastel sequins, layered with a trucker-style jacket, or eased down with the uptight tweed jacket swapped for an overshirt. The great Chanel look, a beacon of bourgeois sobriety, doesn’t need to be imperious: women who crust their hair with gold glitter instead of L’Oreal Satin Hairspray can also make it pretty.
Pretty is almost foolproof in a time of uncertainty. (Pretty, we should clarify, is not beautiful. If you want beauty, look to the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, with his aching procession of kimono-inspired coats. Or Hermès, with its red-blooded leathers – ostrich skin bodysuits stuffed into ostrich skin thigh-high boots and little biker shorts worn with gorgeous leather jackets, cut with bags made of canvas, like a mint sorbet served between rich meat courses.)
Pretty is easy for everyone, except the designer. Dries Van Noten may look effortless in its mixing of lovely autumnal shades: candy apple green, deep happy reds and dense but ditzy florals. But it is the result of discipline on behalf of creative director Julian Klausner, who only took over for Dries Van Noten a little over a year ago. When you consider how elegantly he has adapted to his role, focusing on clothes that delight while almost every other brand spins its wheels, swapping designers like cheap chess pieces and scheming ways to get bigger and bigger – well, then you’re talking about something beautiful.
Pretty can be too saccharine, like Chemena Kamali’s Chloé show: too many big plaid dresses and skirts, conjuring an impractical fairytale that fails to transport because its source material (the 1970s, folk costume) is quoted too obviously. For many women, life in the country sounds like tradwife jail, not a fantastical respite.
Still, in the right hands, pretty can fascinate. Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo, fashion’s foremost philosopher, sent out sculptural masses in black and followed up with the show note: “In the end, there is black. Ultimately Black.” But then, what to make of a bubbly rush of pink dresses shown in the middle? A spark of hope? The last flicker of humanity? Or, as so many of us dream of these days, a welcome moment of diversion?
Other brands had more pragmatic thoughts about fashion’s place in the state of the world. Celine landed on the finest formula of the week: a crisp, wildly stylish procession of inspiring and fabulous outfits that make daily life brighter and funkier. There were moments of pretty (nearly -monochrome looks of pink, cream and brown) but the overall message was one of fresh pragmatism. Designer Michael Rider knows that his job is not to tantalize the world with his ego, a tendency that has brought us countless collections of oversized, lumpy garments that are unrealistic for people to wear, but to enchant them with terrific clothes.
“I don’t know a good word for it in every language, but in America, I’d call it ‘zippy,’” said Rider, an American who arrived last year after a long tenure at Ralph Lauren, backstage. “I think there’s a lot of fabric around. I felt like controlling the fabric a bit more, and letting the person, the walk, the life come through. I would like to be the person who zips around – who’s less ‘swaddled,’ as much as I love a big coat.”
The presence of pragmatism and prettiness throws a show like Balenciaga into unfortunate relief. What in the world is its designer Pierpaolo Piccioli, who almost singlehandedly reinvigorated couture as something urgent and modern during his long tenure at Valentino, doing in collaborating with HBO’s teen drama “Euphoria”? (HBO and CNN share the same parent company, Warner Brothers).
Obviously Piccioli wants to reach a younger audience – but the Sam Levinson TV series, which returns next month, has such a recognizable look, developed by the costume savant Heidi Bivens: intimate but exhibitionist, worn by morose souls with greasy skin and too much eye makeup. Piccioli sent out a mishmash of styles from all over a fashion map that seems to have been drawn five or six years ago (oversize sneakers, faux couture gestures like capes and feathers and blah sportswear). Overall, the emotional effect was something quite ugly.
The-CNN-Wire
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