By CATHY HORYN
Published: July 3, 2008
PARIS
ANNA PIAGGI, the eccentrically painted and plumed editor at Italian Vogue, opened her red parasol at the Chanel haute couture show and sat under it. This was, technically, inviting bad luck, for she was indoors, under the glass dome of the Grand Palais. The sun beat down.
It was like a bell jar, and we were all plants. Ms. Piaggi sought shade, her little red parasol as vivid as a laser dot.
In contrast to high summer and the Paris girls in skimmy dresses, Karl Lagerfeld’s embroidered couture tweeds could not help but seem as heavy as six dusty volumes of Thomas Mann brought down from a forgotten library shelf. Plop! Here you are, fashionable people. Digest this!
A great Chanel collection from Mr. Lagerfeld is not necessarily an interesting collection. It often lacks interior drama, personal obsessions or the weird assertions of an individual mind. At whatever age Mr. Lagerfeld claims to be, he has the right, and certainly the ability, to make his audience uncomfortable — even to disappoint them — if it means he can try on a new idea. As a couturier, he doesn’t have to justify himself. As Mr. Lagerfeld, he doesn’t have to explain.
He says he found the theme for his fall collection, shown on Tuesday, in some organ music. The shape of the pipes inspired the fluted pleats at the waists of gray tweed dresses and dark wool coats, and the bellows may have given him the idea for lavishly puffed sleeves. A gold-embroidered coat overlaid with black strips of fabric in a chevron pattern could have been taken from the ornate wood front of an organ.
Yet, on some level, you can imagine that tubular shapes — vermicelli fringe — would drive him up the wall. The heavy tweeds, the needle-like embroidery and the Germanic darkness seem to come from other, more interesting places in his imagination. A good many effects in this collection will seem strange, like a long dress with short sleeves shaped like square seat cushions or a short silk dress with a turtle back of densely gathered tulle. But you wonder if they are strange only to us because we lack some depth of imagination or culture.
Mr. Lagerfeld said he was going to Dubai this weekend to work on an interior design project. (He did a Fendi show on the Great Wall last year.) And he said that Chanel now has some Russian couture clients who buy 30 to 35 pieces a season. By what impulse today would Mr. Lagerfeld think small and dainty? This might explain his fascination for monolithic backdrops and bold, if puzzling, silhouettes.
A contemporary Dior is a conundrum. It seemed obvious from the full swells and simple lines, the fresh clear colors and subtle embroidery, that John Galliano wants a change. On Monday, he jettisoned the extreme retro shapes and cross-cultural references of the last few years for ultra-feminine dresses and architectural tailoring.
Waists were cinched with leather corset belts, and some jackets had stiff, curving peplums that flared over slim chiffon skirts. Lisa Fonssagrives, the late wife of the photographer Irving Penn, was a reference, and in the outline of some of the black jackets or a slim pastel evening dress draped with billowing yards of silk, you could detect her influence.
But fresher and cleaner doesn’t make Dior contemporary. It just makes it seem, well, less retro. The thing is, we don’t know what makes romantic Dior look up-to-date. Mr. Galliano has defined it in so many different ways. One hopes he will stay on this track, cutting down the shapes even more and moving the romance away from the past.
Last season, Mr. Lagerfeld and Jean Paul Gaultier both looked to the sea for inspiration. Today, Mr. Gaultier had tubular loops of fabric running over shoulders and around hems. It’s not that wonderful an idea. Mr. Gaultier’s fur coats came caged in leather straps, and tunics and knits with flaring hems evoked a comic-book futurism. Not all the classic Gaultier tailoring seemed on the same planet as laser-colored tube dresses, but it was a fun show.
“A Trip to Machu Picchu,” Riccardo Tisci’s collection for Givenchy, aimed to be contemporary. There were bomber jackets in boiled cashmere and waxed leather, cool skirts, Bermudas in stone-washed denim worn over silk jersey leggings, and some draped cocktail dresses in violet silk satin. And several ensembles in striped boiled wool, as well as a vest of woven yak hair, had Machu Picchu written all over them. But Mr. Tisci doesn’t reveal anything with his designs. It is not clear that he has actually designed something so much as taken conventional shapes and tweaked them and called them couture.
“From shadow to asphalt,” Christian Lacroix wrote in the sketchy notes for his show on Tuesday at the Pompidou Center. Only a colorist and a romantic like Mr. Lacroix could find so much variation in black. The collection was heavenly — mysterious through and through, with black in shiny and matte fabrics, paired with its close cousin navy, lightened with Chantilly lace, and often shot with a burst of color.
As somber and smoothly finessed as some of the tailoring was — close-fitting black jackets with subtle embroidery or an edge of creamy silk at the neckline — it was countered with lush skirt volumes. The effect looked fresh. A dress with a beige-pink silk top, its cap sleeves glazed with crystals, had a pleated overskirt with shadowy black stripes. Off in its own Lacroix world was a short slim dress with a front of patchwork felt.
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By CATHY HORYN
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