PARIS — Around the world, the happy few are both happier (at least in financial terms) and fewer. As such, haute couture, with price tags soaring into the hundreds of thousands, is as relevant today as it was a century ago. The couture looks that were paraded in Paris this week came with an air of restoration: covered up to the point of being prudish. Apart from Alessandro Michele, whose digital grand guignol couture debut for Valentino was defiant in its theatricality, leaving few clues as to how the house’s thriving couture business might harness it, designers seemed less focused on storytelling than simply catering to the wealthy.
At Schiaparelli, artistic director Daniel Roseberry made a blatant U-turn, from flamboyancy and clickbait tricks to something relatively rigorous and practically devoid of surrealism. Kudos to Roseberry for the will to move on, replacing baroque decoration with baroque shape. He did so exploring a series of archetypes, from the crinoline to the corolla dress to the bustier, opting for a brand of gentle rigor that at times felt Armani-esque, in part due to the pale and lunar colour palette. And yet, the sense of modernity he was aiming for didn’t quite land and the effort ultimately felt a little costumey.
There was no progress at Chanel, and understandably so: new designer Matthieu Blazy will unveil his vision in September, so for the time being, it’s maintenance mode at the house, with its codes, from tweed to the tailleur to the printed dress, repeated tastefully but with little elan.
Over at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri, claimed a space for fantasy, taking inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” in particular the childish recklessness and determination of the protagonist, no matter the situation. Was it a metaphor for resistance? Chiuri did not say so, but it was fair to think, even though the collection was essentially an exploration of key historical shapes. Brutalized and simplified with childish crudeness, reduced to pure line and volume, 18th-century tailcoats, panniers and crinolines were mixed with boxy a-line dresses and fille en fleur skirts, in a synchronic movement made effective by the lack of colour. Early Peter Greenaway movies — at once historical and abstract, nurtured by his previous practice as an artist — came to mind. It was an interesting outing, but came burdened with a serious lack of editing. Half the number of looks would have conveyed the message more effectively.
Giambattista Valli was feeling introspective and light: his reaction to the times was not escape, but the notion of a walk — some me-time, perhaps, spent in one of Marrakech’s hidden gardens. Too cultured to be literal, Valli did not deliver a Moroccan-themed collection, but a lighter and floatier iteration of his signatures, not one humongous tulle jupon in sight. It made for something fresh, as if, metaphorically speaking, Valli had passed from oils to watercolours.
Giorgio Armani, who celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Armani Privé by showing at “home” in the gilded halls of Palazzo Armani on rue François 1er, was feeling similarly buoyant, exploring themes of shininess and exoticism with poetic restraint. It made for a collection that although riffing on familiar Armani tropes — India, Japan, intense embroidery — felt almost abstract in its linearity, hence relatively new and very elegant.
Viktor & Rolf conceive their absurdist couture collections as exercises around a simple and clear concept, which is taken to the extreme with an obtuseness that’s deliberately farcical. This time around, the name of the game was theme and variation, so that an outfit composed of beige trench coat, white shirt and blue trousers got distorted in whichever possible way, with adamant skills and admirable formal inventiveness, but not much in the way of purpose.
At Gaultier, the guest designer of the season was Ludovic de Saint Sernin. On paper, the marriage between the king of fluidity and leather lace-up briefs and the king of androgyny and the bustier sounded like a good idea, but the results, despite the impeccable execution, felt lukewarm rather than sultry. Ludovic, who is an Instagram star and has a following of premier league influencers and celebs, imagined a shipwreck in which their respective identities made love and mingled, resulting in a cast of cupids and sirens, jockeys in corseted frock coats and damsels with hats in the form of sailing ships and dresses like anchors. It was enjoyable, but the oomph wasn’t there.
Compared with so much glitter ‘n fanfare, the latest iteration of Moda Povera, the project conceived by Olivier Saillard to explore the posthumous lives and lyrical reincarnations of old and discarded clothes, exuded a moving kind of candour. Entitled “Bridal Dresses Always End Up Bachelors,” it focused on the robe de mariée, the epitome of what is worn only once and then forgotten, and one of couture’s main tropes. Saillard worked with cheap relics coming from every era, from the 20s to the 2000s, sourced online, turning them into an array of lovely items, from a tulle t-shirt to an elongated necktie to a dress with a frontal train, rightly shown by a model walking backwards. The “collection,” as ever, was presented with the model being dressed in front of the public and a speaker reading a wonderfully amusing ordre de passage — and it felt as though fashion regained a poetic dimension that was a true act of defiance.
