Throughout the decades we have seen it all on the Parisian runways during Haute Couture Week: dramatic settings, colourful gardens of delights, a magic phantasmagoria of beauty combining fashion with art and cinematic inspirations.
Yet, in the last few years, as the crisis and recession hit us pretty badly, and especially after Christian Lacroix’s house went into bankruptcy, there have been further debates about the necessity of high fashion.
Season after season the question comes back: is Haute Couture an unnecessary frivolity for very few wealthy international clients or is it maybe the ultimate spectacle we are left with in an era of instant 140-character reviews and very little beauty, the highest moment of creativity that also allows fashion houses to display the rare skills of talented seamstresses?
It is somehow amazing that, while the death of couture has been predicted for years and years, it hasn’t happened yet.
Au contraire, trend reports show that couture registered strong sales also thanks to the Asian markets’ turbo-growth.
Christian Dior’s fashion show was even moved to a larger space, the Rodin Museum, to accommodate roughly 800 guests, a record number for a high fashion show.
Who knows, probably even Lacroix, designing under the name “Monsieur C. Lacroix” and currently collaborating with Spanish high street chain Desigual, is dreaming of going back to the artistic excesses of Haute Couture.
And if you think that Haute Couture is only for mature and established designers, think twice: the spotlight this season is on 26-year-old Maxime Simoëns, the youngest couturier and the first designer to join the official Couture calendar without ever having staged a runway show.
Will he manage to impress and maybe inspire a younger generation of designers to join the ranks of the small yet stubbornly resistant Haute Couture army? We will discover it very soon.
In the meantime Alexis Mabille opened the week showcasing his designs at the Musée Bourdelle.
In a way this museum dedicated to the French sculptor was the perfect place to show a collection mainly based on white, a neutral colour that naturally evokes the purest marble statues.
Mabille also mixed in his lace, crepe and duchesse satin designs often characterised by asymmetric cuts, bold and strong nuances, such as dark blue and green and added a floral theme with roses used to decorate a dress or disguised as practical details like a shoulder strap.
Though he mainly opted for traditional silhouettes and floor-length vestal-like tunics prevailed, the designer also carried out interesting experiments incorporating overskirts that could be turned into capes in some of his designs.
Haute Couture doesn’t only mean intricate embroideries and decorations, but also immaculate cuts and perfect geometries.
At the moment there are very few designers out there who can actually master such difficult skills, but Bouchra Jarrar is definitely among them.
The designer opted for a muted sensuality through precise slashes that left open the front and the back of her dresses.
In a collection that seemed to borrow more from architecture than from Lucio Fontana, the best pieces remained her white piped trousers and jackets with open lapels since they displayed a rigorously severe yet perfect silhouette.
“The colours I love the most are red and black; red is a powerful colour in poster design, but I just like it as a matter of taste in the décor,” illustrator René Gruau once stated in an interview.
It was only natural then for John Galliano to use Gruau’s favourite palette and Dior’s red gowns from the Autumn/Winter 1948/49, 1950/51 collections as his starting points for the iconic French fashion house’s Spring/Summer designs.
Galliano actually already went through a “Gruau phase” in the Autumn/Winter 2007-2008 Haute Couture collection that included a white dress with a swirl of reddish pink fabric that formed a rose, a design entitled “Gruau”.
Yet in this collection Galliano decided to interpret the reference in a more literal way: a master in the distribution of form and colour, Gruau was famous for creating distinctive silhouettes with just a few strokes.
Galliano therefore reworked the illustrator’s bold strokes using mother-of-pearl beads, sequins and embroideries to highlight a part of the body or create ink stains and shadows, while Stephen Jones’s headpieces symbolically called to mind bold strokes of paint (View this photo).
As the collection progressed strong colours gave way to softer shades of cinnamon and beige (probably references to the brown sepia backgrounds in Gruau’s images), pale blue and dégradé nuances, elements often used by Galliano to create the chiaroscuro effects that characterised early Haute Couture images à la Irving Penn and that could also be interpreted as references to Gruau’s skills at incorporating in his fashion illustrations photographic and cinematic elements, composing his works by using light and shadow effects.
By applying layers of tulle on jackets and embroidery only on one side of the fabric, Galliano created poetic effects, suspended between Gruau’s illustrations and Penn’s photographs.
Yet there was nothing new in terms of silhouettes and shapes since the New Look was revised in all the designs.
The clock was indeed brought back to the post-War years and Galliano made fashionable once again jackets cinched at the waist with wide belts, bulbous oversized bows, voluminous pleated skirts matched with rigid peplum jackets that looked like crossovers between the iconic “Bar” and the “Rubempré” suits; yards of tulle reminiscent of the “Offenbach” ball gown from Dior’s Spring/Summer 1950 collection (obviously random members of the press sadly spotted in this case the umpteenth Black Swan reference as if tulle only equalled ballet…); a brown jacket with leopard spot-like embroideries (View this photo) that called to mind Gruau’s (Mitzah Bricard-inspired) Miss Dior advert with a slender lady’s hand resting on a leopard paw; ethereal clouds of white marabou and masked models, perfect icons of style rooted in the collective imagination who looked like the incarnation of Gruau’s iconic images for Le Rouge Baiser lipstick (remember the late ‘40s “Sans hésiter Le Rouge Baiser” ads? View this photo).
As a whole the collection wasn’t extremely theatrical (though there was a final theatrical moment with Galliano in one of his Nureyev-inspired designs from his Autumn/Winter 2011 menswear collection…), but the beauty of a Dior Haute Couture collection doesn't stand in its theatricality, but in the fact that it still allows you to effortlessly write beautifully because it is beautifully executed.
While Dior played with chiaroscuro, Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel analysed the power of light. The focus here was on delicate ethereal designs, revolving around a palette of pale pink, grey and white.
Though beads, sequins and embroideries decorated the dresses and tight trousers, nothing was extremely heavy.
To emphasise the theme of light, Lagerfeld accessorised his lighter-than-air designs with flat backless black patent shoes bound to the ankle via transparent straps, evoking in this way the grace of ballet dancers.
There was actually a stronger reference to ballet: though some of the designs displayed echoes from the rich Chanel’s pre-Fall 2011 collection looking like ethereal versions of the Empress Theodora look, Lagerfeld mainly turned to the Ballets Russes, a constant inspiration for many collections in the last few seasons.
Yet, rather than going for the most obvious reference, Coco Chanel’s designs for "Le Train Bleu", Lagerfeld opted for Marie Laurencin who designed the sets and costumes for Francis Poulenc’s "Les Biches" (1923; translated in English as "House Party").
This proved an interesting connection since, while the collection looked rather innocent and ethereal, the ballet that inspired it actually explored a host of taboo themes such as narcissism, voyeurism, female sexual power and sapphism.
Through his apparently innocent designs, Lagerfeld was maybe referencing such themes and Laurencin’s strong women, evoking her short dresses of greyish tulle faced with pieces of pink moiré in his rough-edged pink bouclé suits matched with narrow trousers, drop-waist dresses, feathered skirts and trapeze-shaped tunic jackets.
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Whew! The white gown is so beautiful! I just hope my wife could wear a gown as beautiful as that.
Posted by: ivory suits | May 07, 2011 at 11:29 AM