Paris: September 29
By Rebecca Voight
It was a birthday special in Paris on Monday with Cacharel celebrating it’s 50th and Martin Margiela looking back on his 20-year design career.
Cacharel has a new design team and they are a perfect match for the house which had made its name with Liberty floral prints. The English design duo Mark Eley and Wakako Kishimoto injected Cacharel’s cotton classics with their bolder, graphic print vision, which retains a precise and laid back British style in paint brush colors. To snap up here are Cacharel’s limited edition birthday pieces with prints from the ’70s.
Christian Dior wasn’t celebrating a birthday, so John Galliano decided to join the revolution. It’s a youth quake to be precise. Galliano’s usual runway theatrics are over. It’s as if he took the world financial crisis to heart—these are money-in-the-bank clothes. But only if you’re under 25, because with this show he also sharply reduced the house age limit. The collection’s African theme played in the sunburst color palette, patchwork snakeskin bags and stiletto sandals with tribal fertility goddess heels, but the shapes are souped up ’80s—think Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, Jean Paul Gaultier and Azzedine Alaïa in their heyday. Galliano gave busts the cone treatment, cinched the waist, and made transparent mini skirts float. In case you were wondering what to wear under that, he paired everything with short shorts that look sort of like a girdle. This basic shape is a base for all sorts of ethnic beading and the result is quite chic.
Isabel Marant isn’t just a French fashion designer, she’s also a real girl. Her collection was full of country chic beginning with the low-belted, thigh-high shirtdress in a great patchwork design that kicked off the show. Marant has one idea for spring footwear: a low boot covered with biker chains, just the thing for rock chicks. Ethnic smock dresses are worn under overalls with the straps hanging and there are plenty of rebellious ruffle tops in gauzy fabrics to keep girls dressed for action from morning til evening.
Jun Takahashi of Undercover is a protégé of Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo and probably the most talented young designer in Japan today. Apparently he’s tired of runway shows, at least this season. Instead, he did a still life presentation followed by a party in an airy hall in a rough part of town. The show featured his clothes and the imaginary beings called Graces, which he and made into dolls. The epic photographs by Katsuhide Morimoto took up the venue’s huge wall space. With an eerie E.T. quality, they depicted humans and Graces interacting. And the clothes, all in shades of white and with Takahashi’s Graces (imagine a slightly menacing lamb-like creature with lit-up eyes) posed on the shoulders, were also eerie. Long, virginal dresses in crinkled silk with shirring, and jackets vests and shorts in fringed silk that was so fine it looked like eyelashes. The best piece was a vest in white leather with its own white chiffon scarf attached to the lapel.
Maison Martin Margiela: So what’s all the brouhaha? In Monday’s International Herald Tribune, Suzy Menkes speculated on Martin Margiela’s retirement after this show, which celebrates the 20th anniversary of his house. Purchased by Renzo Rosso of Diesel several years ago, it’s true there have been tensions merging Margiela’s creative stance and Rosso’s money-making ways together, though a spokesperson has denied that the designer will step down.
The Margiela show was held at the brand new 104 (Cent Quatre) on rue d’Aubervilliers, the gigantic 419,792-square-foot multimedia art space that is scheduled to open October 11. Margiela kept the crowd waiting for over an hour, which is long even by Paris standards. The show reprised his hits—from the lab coats worn by his team to a photo print of a jacket on a satin T-shirt, just one of his classic trompe l’oeils. Margiela never shows his face or gives interviews and true to form, all the models’ heads were covered in bank-robber pantyhose. Sometimes their faces were covered by wigs—a play on his back to front designs— and they had to be wheeled in on a platform. And then the wigs took over and became jackets, which was one of the best looks of the show. By the time two girls came out engulfed under a giant collapsed satin wedding cake, the crowd was cheering. But this collection of former hits posed one question: after feeding the industry so many great ideas over the years, where is this collection headed?
Later that night, much later, Yohji Yamamoto set up shop at the Carreau du Temple on rue Dupetit-Thouars in the Marais.
Most of the audience spent the pre-show at one of the great bistro cafés across the street from the cavernous space. And I have to recommend Café Crème. I settled in, found myself famished and managed to have a lovely warm goat cheese salad with a glass of Costières de Nîmes red before the show. That kind of speedy service is unheard of in Paris. And the staff was cheerful, which is also rare around here. Later that night when I realized I had left my glasses somewhere, I called Café Crème and sure enough, they had them waiting for me.
Yamamoto is not saying adieu to la mode, nor is he celebrating a birthday. The show was an ode to mysteriously beautiful women with dark glasses, and it had the over-exposed style brigade remembering what makes fashion so interesting after all. The elongated, asymmetrical jackets with raised white stitching that opened the show were effortlessly cool and led to smock-like coats that billowed without looking bulky and a series of simply huge white shirts over billowing skirts. After I got used to the clothes, I noticed the hair, which gets my vote for best of the season: swept up and left dangerously hanging in mid-air, it looked like the lightest breeze would blow it away. Yamamoto’s clothes are like another good Woody Allen film: you’re slightly spoiled because the clothes are unfailingly good, and even though little has changed, everything is slightly different.
Rebecca Voight is a Paris-based freelance writer.
CACHAREL | CHRISTIAN DIOR | YOHJI YAMAMOTO
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