By GUY TREBAY
Published: March 6, 2008
Paris
Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
FROM THE CASTLE AND THE CONVENT Fashions for fall shown in Paris by Givenchy.
HUGE crowds gathered last summer at the Russian pavilion of the Venice Biennale to see a three-screen video installation by a collective known as AES+F. Filled with dreamy computer-game landscapes, scary monsters, rocket ships, carousels and nearly naked post-pubescent models engaged in elaborate mock battles, “Last Riot” was the apocalypse rendered pastel and made chic.
The artists set the piece to Wagner, as artists often have when the leitmotif is The End. This strategy worked for Francis Ford Coppola when he needed to hit the doom button (and drown out the rotor wash) in “Apocalypse Now,” and it also worked pretty well when Bugs Bunny was playing Josh Brolin to Elmer Fudd’s Javier Bardem in the 1957 cartoon “What’s Opera, Doc?”
Whether the end is nigh is rarely the point. What matters is that, when people fear shifts in the cultural tectonics, they tend to reach for myth and the verities. And, while it may seem like a stretch to extend this observation to a sphere as ostensibly superficial as fashion, it was hard to come away from the season just ended here without thinking that dressmakers are spooked by the cold breath of change.
Like the battle scenes in “Last Riot” (Miuccia Prada’s favorite piece at the Venice art fair, by the way), the Paris season gave the impression of being a valiant defense of the ramparts of chic.
And there were good reasons for this. Faced with overwhelming shifts in the way clothes are manufactured; with the widespread dispersal and pirating of information on the Internet; with markets broadening to encompass not just familiar consumer elites, but entire swaths of the globe; and with the knowledge that their boldest efforts seem puny compared with the chess moves being enacted by the multinational titans who employ them, a lot of designers are befuddled. What should they do? Change careers? Why not, instead, reach into the costume trunks and, like the pretty combatants in “Last Riot,” take up a wooden swords and play pretend.
The recurrent themes of the season’s playacting were nostalgia, full-blown romanticism and crypto-religiosity. These were everywhere visible, but most particularly at Alexander McQueen, Givenchy, Prada, Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent.
The McQueen show, titled “The Girl Who Lived in a Tree,” was inspired by a fable the designer concocted about a maiden who lives in a six-century-old elm in his English garden, and who comes out at night “to meet a prince and become a queen.”
Because the designer has recently toured India, the queen in question was probably Victoria. But Mr. McQueen’s was not so much the image of the dour and hard-headed sovereign of historical record as of a Raj Barbie, a creature from a music-hall pantomime, clad in what one critic described as “ballerina-length, multi-flounced dance dresses, each more insanely exquisite than the last.”
She was a skinny queen, too, trussed up in corsets that added a note of perversity easy to read as a clue to a control fetish, something autoerotic. When a designer takes a girl — a wraith, really — like the English model Lily Donaldson and binds her waist, it’s hard to avoid thinking of how unruly the world must seem from inside his skull.
No one can really blame designers for trying to conserve themselves or to regulate the growing demands on creativity. “People are becoming overwhelmed,” the D. J. Michel Gaubert remarked last Thursday, as he stood by an oval portal to a luminous biomorphic tent constructed inside the Grand Palais for the Yves Saint Laurent show.
Mr. Gaubert, a seasoned D. J. who has spent decades creating aural backgrounds for labels like Saint Laurent and Chanel, noted how the increasing rapidity of fashion’s production cycles seems to affect everyone. “Look at the number of outfits people are showing,” he said. “Look at how many shows there are a day. Look at how many cities and markets buyers have to think about.”
Even the shows themselves are getting faster, it seems, an impression confirmed if one happened to see a video that accompanies a costume exhibition Christian Lacroix assembled from the archives of Le Musée des Arts Décoratifs. In it, the 1980s-era mannequin Dalma is seen sauntering the catwalk at a Lacroix show, pausing, posing, cocking her head, twirling, making a moue.
In those days, Dalma was known as a fairly peppy character on the catwalk (as opposed to, say, Iman, who moved so magisterially she should have been accompanied by tugboats). Yet compared with either of those two, models now break from the gate like sprinters. They almost have to in order to make it up and back a 90-foot runway in time to whip backstage for the next change of clothes.
“The demands on everyone are constantly growing,” Mr. Gaubert said, referring not just to the twice-yearly ready-to-wear collections, but also to the couture presentations some labels produce, as well as precollections and resort collections and — ka-ching! — accessories.
“People can’t keep up,” he said. “The demand is insane.”
So, perhaps in response to this, designers retrench. They embrace conservative ideas and the clothes that suit them. They look backward. They outfit models as an army of automatons, the way Stefano Pilati, the gifted Saint Laurent designer, did. His pale-faced cadres wore black lipstick, had eyes obscured by black-bowl wigs and bodies encased in clothes of a stark geometry rarely seen outside the Vatican.
Jean-Luce Huré for The New York Times
MAGNIFIED Chanel’s carousel at the Grand Palais.
“I don’t think you want to go out advertising a brand anymore,” Mr. Pilati told Style.com after the show.
Mr. Pilati was not alone in balking at the idea of becoming a logo machine. At Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesquiere produced a collection that was as much about formalist feats as about anything as banal and frivolous as grabbing an after-work cocktail. At Prada in Milan, Miuccia Prada showed a collection of stark widow’s weeds. At Lanvin, Alber Elbaz made ribboned dresses that summoned up Victorian mourning clothes. And at Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci presented dresses that had a renunciatory feeling. They were clothes for a streetwalker who has forgone her wicked ways and taken the veil.
Even the stylized clothes Marc Jacobs showed for Louis Vuitton were devout, at least in their allegiance to traditional French style ideals. A lot of people thought that Mr. Jacobs’s designs looked like monastic vestments, and some (well, I) found the heavy woolens and kooky conical headgear evocative of the uniforms (purple shrouds and two-tone Nikes) worn by the Heaven’s Gate cultists of Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.
Those benighted souls will be remembered, of course, for having committed mass suicide in 1997 with the help of vodka and phenobarbital, in the hope of meeting a spaceship they thought was hidden behind Comet Hale-Bopp. Everybody, as the artists who made the “Last Riot” seemed to understand, is looking for a faith, however misguided or outright spurious.
While some find it in the imagery and crafts of the past, others remain resolutely forward thinking. Few designers treat the idea of submitting to anything other than the zeitgeist with as much lip-curling disdain as Karl Lagerfeld. “I don’t believe in anything,” he said recently in an interview with the French editor Olivier Zahm. “I envy people who have faith. It must make things easier.”
Yet Mr. Lagerfeld, who is now in his 70s, is being disingenuous. Few are more devout about promoting what one French critic called, correctly if pretentiously, “the sacralization of consumer goods.”
As if to prove this, Mr. Lagerfeld set his Chanel show at the Grand Palais this season on an immense carousel adorned with outsize versions of house classics like sling-back shoes, camellias, quilted handbags and ballerina flats. Fashion, he seemed to be saying, may not yet have attained recognition as a global creed. But it takes a true disbeliever to question its role as the outward expression of our deep faith in acquiring things.
Markets may slump. The dollar may become the peso. China and Russia may turn the United States into a rest stop on the superhighway of global economy. None of that is likely to deter people from impoverishing themselves in order to possess the latest who-knows-what.
“Everybody knows the economy is terrible,” Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director of Bloomingdale’s, remarked last week as the sun broke through the winter clouds and gilded the city. “But whatever happens, and I believe this with all my heart,” she said, “there is always something special, that one unique thing, that one special object you want so much you’ll do without food to have.”
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