Recharging the City of Light

By ERIC WILSON
Published: October 2, 2008

It was late, almost midnight, inside a plastic tent the size of a used-car dealership set down in the distant gardens of Saint-Cloud. Waiters had brought around plates of ravioli with more truffles than pasta and big sticks of crab leg wrapped in sole and buckets of Perrier-Jouët. When the models finally appeared, they wore poufy berets atop their crimped French-poodle hairdos, a little like Goldie Hawn in “Private Benjamin.” The music was Barry White, and the mood was just as smooth. The show felt as if it was from another time — specifically, the 1970s — when fashion was just for the moment and not so complicated.

It was Ms. Rykiel’s 40th anniversary, and she celebrated with a collection that snapped the life back into a Paris Fashion Week that had felt drained by the dismal economic outlook. If the ship is going down, she must have thought, let’s stick with the band. Her jackets were as sparkly as the nightly light show on the Eiffel Tower. Her pastel dresses were covered with feathered regalia fit for Louis XIV. And her dazzlingly beruffled models danced right off the stage during a show that lasted 40 minutes and ended with 30 looks made by other designers in tribute to Ms. Rykiel. (There were silk pajamas and a “Holy Smoke” T-shirt from Ann Demeulemeester, and a knit dress with needles attached and a ball of yarn trailing it from Jean Paul Gaultier).

But it all seemed like a distant, kind of fuzzy dream by Thursday morning. The reality of French fashion today is that it is, like that of most other countries, a melting pot, home to designers from Britain, the Netherlands, Colombia and the United States. There is no longer a national style to speak of, only collections, some of them exemplary citizens and some in need of deportation.

Stella McCartney’s show was exceptional. If it is possible for her designs to become any more light and ephemeral, as they have season after season, eventually there will be nothing to see besides Sir Paul sitting across the runway. For spring, she showed a nearly transparent jacket and rice-paper-thin sweater the color of unripened apricots over transparent sequined bodysuits, just figments of her imagination, really. This season’s jumpsuits were more tangible, the top half structured as a dinner jacket in one case, and as a trench in another.

What really worked in her favor was that Ms. McCartney, whose clothes are generally and admirably accessible, introduced some fairly conceptual ideas that still seemed wearable — namely, a great silk shantung trench that was enveloped inside a larger version of the same coat.

Viktor & Rolf opted to show online this week instead of the runway, and the effort was largely commendable. There is a palpable sense that the runway system no longer works, but no one can figure out an alternative, so we spend a month every season chasing 400-plus shows while shoppers click through them in 15 minutes at home.


The video that the designers, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, showed was a designer’s ultimate fantasy in that every look was modeled by Shalom Harlow, who totally worked it. But you could actually get a pretty realistic idea of the dresses, dangling like paper lanterns, and how the loudly graphic striped tights and shorts combinations gave off a robotic Balenciaga vibe. Still, this is not a perfect medium for the designers, for back in their showroom, the colors looked different, and sometimes better — a dress that appeared red and yellow online was actually more of a rust and mustard.

Hurricane Hussein (Chalayan, that is) also blew through the city, subjecting his models to extreme conditions in the form of industrial wind machines pointed in their faces and aerobics-style bathing suits that exposed their rear ends, a one-two punch that delighted only the photographers. What Mr. Chalayan was getting at was the danger of speed. The idea was repeated in prints of futuristic-looking cars and zooming-by street scenes on minidresses and, inevitably, a crash scene at the end, a metaphor, he said, for the economy. Mr. Chalayan hammered the point a bit hard when he actually smashed a bar full of wineglasses at the finale.

Several dresses were fascinating, made of latex molded into whipped-cream peaks extending from the back to appear in blurry motion. But the message felt a tad preachy, like a crossing guard wagging his finger at the Treasury. Hey! Look both ways!

Esteban Cortazar’s second season at Emanuel Ungaro suggests that he may be out of his league. There were some cute minidresses with painterly brush-stroke prints from the precocious designer, but not enough to stand up to an important litmus test: Which character on “Ugly Betty” would these clothes suit best? If your collection includes a poncho, you need a makeover, pronto.

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