PARIS: It’s a wrap! And that was the joyous feeling that invaded the audience after the Lanvin show on the final day of the spring/summer 2008 season. And the wrap – drapes of folds like a 21st century toga – is one of the strongest trends.
The show that Alber Elbaz prepared for Lanvin was a hit from the moment that the audience saw the scene of an old-style music hall with strings of lights, pillars from which sparkler fireworks later exploded and roving ushers handing out ice cream cones. And that’s not to mention the fact that the designer’s signature big bow tie was worn by the show’s security staff. When the model who closed the show walked out in a square-cut tuxedo and bow tie as a clone of Elbaz, it brought the house down.
This upbeat show was not just about fun and games. It was a serious – but never solemn – look at how to take the easy Lanvin style forward. The strength of Elbaz is that everything flows naturally – and that includes the dresses in primary shades of yellow, green and red with a longer hem at the back, billowing as if in full sail.
The wind machine at the end of the runway put heady movement into the ultra-light trench coats that blew over draped dresses and sent the feathers on a bodice all a-flutter. But the clothes were grounded in a reality that was urban in its smudgy gray toga drapes and other off-one-shoulder shapes. There was a hint of Africa in drumbeats on the sound track and in the fringe, beading and feathers that came together in one chic dress.
“Flying,” said Elbaz backstage, using the word to encompass everything from the bouncy layers of frills to the techno hardwear that came this season as clips on a side seam or just a smattering of metallic studs. One of Elbaz’s strengths is that he can recapitulate his ideas – but always taking fashion forward.
The usually restrained actress Kristen Scott Thomas was brimming with excitement, saying, “Wasn’t that beautiful?” backstage, her enthusiasm speaking for the entire fashion audience.
By the time Marc Jacobs took to the runway at his Louis Vuitton show, pointing gleefully at the video-screen bag he toted and making facial gestures, everyone had already got the message: “You want handbags? Take that! And that! And that!”
There were, it is true, 6 out of 57 exits without those money-spinning bags. And the clothes were colorful, if chaotic. But since the show opened with a dozen of the most iconic of famous supermodels (including Naomi Campbell, Eva Herzigova and Nadja Auermann) dressed in nothing but translucent nylon raincoats over colored corsetry and with a lacy mask across the lips (oh! and carrying handbags, of course), the Jacobs theme of the season was set.
Vuitton had worked in collaboration with the American artist Richard Prince, famous for his sardonic takes as art works and for his “Naughty Nurses” series of fetishized hospital figures, re-colored in lurid shades on postwar pulp fiction covers.
The show tent was lined with similar book covers announcing “Tokyo by Night” – or any other city you could name to cover the vast space. The bags themselves seemed rather calmer: big, square shapes with brush strokes or photographic effects wiping out some of the “Louis Vuitton” letters under what seemed like a plasticized surface.
How fortunate that there was a letter on each surgical cap of the sexed-up nurses, who lined up to spell out LOUIS VUITTON, as did the finale of corseted women, bringing a Dolce & Gabbana-style ending to the show.
Prince defined what has been called “appropriation art,” using existing work to morph it into something else. That is Jacobs’s method too. The clothes took what the music business would describe as “samplings” of existing pieces, putting them randomly together, often to fine effect, as in a sky blue jersey dress worn over a rainbow of pink/mauve/blue tulle bunched underneath. The vivid colors were compelling: thigh-high hose in spring green rising below a narrow skirt split at the middle; or the coral, yellow, turquoise and scarlet used for bouncy skirt dresses.
Was it art? Was it fashion? Just count the LV bags.
A sly, fetishistic sexuality filled the Miu Miu collection where ultra-short skirts were a parody of French maids’s. The models walked with their derrieres covered with rompers and their wrists and ankles bound with snowy white lacy cuffs.
Miuccia Prada, for whom Miu Miu is an increasingly assertive part of her oeuvre, is both explicit and implicit in her collections. Projected on the wall were repeated random clips – of classical ballet, of the “Burning Man” festival, of sumo wrestlers, Japanese swimmers. Whatever. The front-row star Adrien Brody and his actress-girlfriend, Elsa Pataky, just loved it.
“It’s about the theater of life – and how people dress for their performances,” said Prada, as though this helped to explain why the models had gleaming dragonflies or spiders stretched over their shoes. (To sell shoes, maybe?)
But however weird Prada’s vision is, she has been making Miu Miu compelling viewing. The glutinous nylon transparency of last season’s Miu Miu, inserting sexuality into classic clothes, is all over the current runways. How the tutu skirts with a ballet bounce, the Las Vegas show girl looks, the harlequin stripes and the streamlined pajama tops with narrow pants will translate into a fashion direction is as obscure as Prada’s projections. But be sure that she is onto something – even if it is just costuming a rerun of that ultimate seductive 1949 vision by Jean Genet of “The Maids.”
