A Goodbye Kiss for Paris

By CATHY HORYN
Published: October 6, 2008
Paris

At 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, the scheduled start of the Louis Vuitton show, 52 models were dressed and waiting in a line backstage. Marc Jacobs, in a three-piece suit with his hair slicked back, was kidding around. Robert Duffy, his business partner, walked along the line, and as he approached Raquel Zimmermann he mentioned that the models had on pretty lingerie. Ms. Zimmermann lifted her short skirt to show black point d’esprit underpants.

“Remember,” Mr. Jacobs said, poking his head between two girls in the line, “this is a city where even the meter readers wear high heels.” The show was slightly delayed for the arrival of Mr. Jacobs’s boss, Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

But in a way, seeing the models in the line told a lot about the intensity of Mr. Jacobs’s affection for Paris, and how expressive he has become as a designer. Make it layered, make it visual, make it personal. The backbone of the collection was the structured flirty jacket — emblematic of Paris fashion. The short skirts were a collage of materials and textures. An Asian influence was marked by metallic obi belts. Ostrich feather skirts, leopard-pattern bags and decoratively beaded shoes evoked Africa.



The spirit of Yves Saint Laurent? Not quite. If anything, Mr. Jacobs’s Vuitton show was a spoof on the elements we think of as quintessentially French, like the chic jacket, the polka-dot pajama and the poodle hairdo. But in spite of the sentiment of the Édith Piaf soundtrack, the modernity of the show ultimately rested on how visual the clothes were.

Miuccia Prada closed the Paris spring shows with a fine Miu Miu collection that also combined textures — burlap and satin — in predominantly slim dresses that had detachable half skirts. She also showed Greco-Roman prints, but the use of paint-splashed burlap was most intriguing.

In his show, Alber Elbaz caught the flavor for the exotic, with lush colors and leopard prints. Africa has been a potent theme of the collections, with Azzedine Alaïa making the most exuberant display in raffia and python.

So one of the strangest Paris seasons ended, made confusing by deepening economic worries, bouts of real creativity and the feeling that, as hard as some designers worked, retailers will have to work even harder next spring to get customers to come into the stores just for a look.

A number of collections should be celebrated. Mr. Elbaz’s best dresses had a nonchalant style of draping; hardly D.I.Y., but if you’re wearing a one-shoulder dress in fireball-orange silk with a puff of fabric grazing your face and arm, the effect should be slightly unserious. Many of the outfits were in taffeta, cloqué and duchess silk, and Mr. Elbaz gave them volume in simple ways — and sometimes with an interior band of grosgrain to hold things in place — and some dresses were in fact a top and a skirt. He cut the tops long so they could also be worn in a different proportion with pants, and he twisted the fabric slightly so the shape wouldn’t look flat and boring.

What looked new were slim pants with tacked-down pleats that gave shape to the waist; there was no actual waistband. Full sleeves, set into the shoulders of jewel-neck cloqué blouses, created a very narrow line — like a twig, which of course you may not be.

But you can play. The collection was, finally, in that spirit — the stilettos joyfully blitzed with tacky beads, a bone silk dress embroidered with stones in an abstract leopard pattern.

Alexander McQueen used computer images of crushed crystals, wood grains, animals, human skeletons and the iron grid of the Eiffel Tower as the basis for dazzling digitalized prints on silk jersey. The palette includes smoky grays, delphinium blues and vibrant parrot colors that look fractured by a prism. All the dress and jacket shapes were within the realm of the imagination, especially the fluttery dresses, and then you had the particular flavor of the engineered prints.

Mr. McQueen said his show was inspired by Darwinism and the Industrial Revolution, among other world-shaping forces. That gave him the historical ground for his romantic tailoring, leather corset belts, and molded showpiece dresses (covered with pounds of crystals and duly translated into more wearable dresses in the showroom). It’s just a good thing that he managed to pull out the prints from all that antiquity.

Backstage, in his fully furnished dressing room, John Galliano said that his vividly colored collection was inspired by James Gillray, an 18th-century caricaturist.

I’m sure my eyes glazed over. “I’ll Google him,” I said.

Here is a passage from the Tate Museum site: “Gillray’s targets range from lecherous men to amateur actors and musicians, and include the passion for art collecting as well as sex and gambling; all are exposed with great wit and graphic invention but also unrelenting cruelty.”

You could have blown me over with a Chanel feather: it sounded just like the fashion world, especially the bit about a “passion for art collecting.” Mr. Galliano indeed captured Gillray’s distinctly satirical palette of sunny yellows, baby and rosy pinks, and aristocratic blues — ideal for making light of pompous things. Under Bo Peep bonnets and sleeping caps made extreme by the milliner Stephen Jones, Mr. Galliano presented clothes that were light and pretty in the best sense.

No need to analyze a draped dress in pink silk jersey with drawstrings at the waist and hem. It fell on the body in a flattering way and looked fresh and new. The same was true of puffy blouses in crisp cotton or silk that spilled off one shoulder, and looked gentle and inviting compared with some of the ugly and overwrought clothes we’ve seen in the last two weeks.

There was probably not a better evening dress anywhere in Paris (well, maybe with the exception of Chanel and Alaïa) than a square-neck gown in cream silk jersey with a lightly draped bodice, soft sleeves and a long sleek skirt. A number of Mr. Galliano’s dresses were quite transparent, requiring a slip and a decent body, but the real measure of this wonderful show was how unfussy and free it was.

Chloé’s new designer, Hannah MacGibbon, made a fair start, offering sundresses with ruffled crisscrossed backs, a sharp-shouldered jumpsuit in khaki cotton, and a cool, one-shoulder dress in nutmeg cotton with side lacing. Sandals were flat (black straps, say, with a Kelly green sole). Scalloping (around hems and dinosaur-style down the sleeves of a bitter-lemon coat) looked cute in small doses. No doubt Ms. MacGibbon, who worked at the house once before under Phoebe Philo, will hear from plenty of critics about her very large trousers, and look back upon them critically herself and feed her eye from smaller plates.

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