Paris: October 2
By Rebecca Voight
Thursday began with Stella McCartney, and she has fantastic friends. The artists Dinos and Jake Chapman painted a bright collage of children and animals as the backdrop for her show. She also has three young children. I mention that because she doesn’t seem to be trailing nannies 24/7 and you have to wonder how she does it.
The show was full of real clothes suitable for wearing casually during the day. And that’s quite an accomplishment–obviously McCartney’s experience designing active pieces for Adidas has shaped her. The standouts here: a beige jumpsuit tailored like a blazer, a voluminous trench, an oversized pineapple-lace tent dress, and a thin-as-air sequined T-shirt dress worn with a large, equally filmy and slouchy sweater. The great thing about wearing more than one piece of next spring’s transparence is that the layering is alluring without being see-through.
The lovely Marcel Marongiu is designing for Guy Laroche, and in his quiet way he covered many of the key points for spring: jackets with sleek peplums over thigh-high, draped silk skirts, crisscross necklines to show lots of bare shoulder on simple sheath dresses, reptile print chiffon and transparent panels in all the right places. It’s soign’ for day with a rock element and some bright colors and short lengths if you want them.
Giambattista Valli has, I must admit, taken me by surprise. Since leaving Emanuel Ungaro several years ago and starting his own house, he has single-handedly drawn the spotlight to his collection by offering his glamorous social friends the clothes they want to wear. And they were all at the show, along with actresses Natalie Portman and Emma Watson. Valli’s hot pink drop-waist coat that Leigh Lezark of the MisShapes wore to the show, with it’s layer of kinky ruffles peeking out from underneath, is the most interesting piece I’ve seen in the crowd this week.
Valli takes several different positions for spring, some of them, like the ’50s couture-style cinched-waist, duchesse satin, party dresses with sharply flared skirts play to his clients’ sense of romance, but they’re not easy to wear. His hourglass sheaths and a boxy suit in crunchy, jet-incrusted lace offered just the right combination of drama and wearable body consciousness.
I don’t know if Zucca is a big name in Canada, but I have always loved what Akira Onozuka, who once assisted Issey Miyake, does. The clothes are elegant, but like others in Japan, Zucca is not into dressy glitz at all. There’s always a jean jacket and casual cotton dresses and even T-shirts, in his collections and the result is really young and fresh (and expensive by the time it leaves Japan). The spring collection took flamenco style–the bright prints and layers of ruffles Spanish women stamp their feet in–and did it the Japanese way in Lolita T-shirt dresses in a riot of prints and ruffles and bright colors worn with finely-detailed faded jean jackets.
This is Ivana Omazic’s last season designing for Celine, but she has her own collection back in London so all’s well. The arrival of Phoebe Philo, who will begin showing next September after several years on hiatus, is very exciting. Fashion is still running with some of the ideas Philo launched when she designed for Chloé. Spring at Celine is full of bright, full-skirted chiffon dresses in yellow and blue with waists cinched like ballerina dresses. The best were dip-dyed for a blue rainbow on white. This combination of transparency, narrow waists and gradated color on floaty dresses, in a lovely knee length for once, was the best part of the show.
Haider Ackermann is one of the best young designers working with leather in Paris. His jackets and dresses are incredibly thin, almost like a second skin, and this season he works with bias zips to reveal a peek of what you’re wearing underneath (usually a couple of skinny silk T-shirts).
Bernhard Willhelm is German and studied in Antwerp, but his collections have a Japanese kawaii (cute) factor and he has a big following there. The fashion press is lamenting the lack of “sportswear” at Paris Fashion Week. They obviously don’t know about Willhelm, whose collection is casual and a bit freaky and very sporty–as in floppy sweaters and T-shirts and airy toga dresses you might want to wear over a pair of slims. This was all done in fantastic prints, from one that looked like Keith Haring maze doodles to wacky, tribal mask graphics and a sexy cartoon print that was like something from R. Crumb.
Thursday’s finale was Stefano Pilati’s collection for Yves Saint Laurent, which was eagerly awaited, hotly debated and unfortunately a bit overwrought this season. But the man who has brought so much excitement, direction and elegance to fashion recently, including YSL’s current graphic collection for fall, can be forgiven. Pilati’s desire for “extreme simplicity” made for a stiff, stark show symbolized by a pair of open latticework low boots that looked like jail for chic feet. And then there’s this collection’s Japanese fisherman-style pants (i.e. low at the crotch, like a sarouel). Call them what you will, and try as you might, the only time the infamous low crotch ever took off was zouave pants in the 1970s. What’s good here jackets: the elegant cropped kimono, a pearlized minimalist trench, cinched with a bow and the new smoking, which is slouchy with flap pockets and closes asymmetrically, falling diagonally over the hips. There was one two-piece dress with a perfectly-fitted hourglass skirt and a matching blouse with a transparent yoke that shows off just a hit of glittering green bra. Ah, that one was great!
Shown: Stella McCartney Spring 2009. Photography by Peter Stigter
Rebecca Voight is a Paris-based writer.
STELLA MCCARTNEY | YVES SAINT LAURENT
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