With the fashion industry focused on the slew of designers making their debuts at major brands in the autumn, Haute Couture Week in Paris felt a little like the warm-up act before the real drama starts.
That’s not to say that there weren’t moments of impressive creativity and drama during this showcase for unique clothes for the 0.001 per cent, which are largely handmade and can cost tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Trust Daniel Roseberry of Schiaparelli to set a high bar for the rich and strange with his show at the Petit Palais. He sent out a scarlet bias-cut satin gown with a bodice of moulded breasts, worn with a red rhinestone necklace in the shape of a human heart that pulsed mechanically — a surreal jewel that recalled Salvador Dalí’s 1953 jewel “The Royal Heart”. It was beautiful but eerie, and caused a stir on the internet.
Roseberry’s overall inspiration was the 1930s, a period he describes as “the twilight of glamour” before the Germans invaded Paris. He recreated the world captured in black-and-white photos with fluid satin dresses and tweed skirt suits in black, silver and grey. It was a darker and moodier collection than usual, with hints of fetish. Roseberry said backstage that it’s not only geopolitics that’s on the edge of a precipice, but fashion too.
It was good to see turbulent times acknowledged, however obliquely, even if it’s debatable whether couture is the best medium to explore the parallels between now and the run-up to the second world war.
Couture is billed as fashion’s highest form of art and a laboratory for designers to explore ideas and techniques — literally in the case of Dutch designer Iris van Herpen, who made a dress from bioluminescent algae. Makers underline the importance of preserving crafts and jobs. Indian designer Rahul Mishra said backstage that he employs more than 2,000 craftspeople to make his intricate, theatrical creations.
Mishra’s aesthetic is very different from Roseberry’s, but the show did open with a model in a gold dress representing a heart, with embroidered arteries. Mishra was inspired by “this beautiful idea in Sufism literature called the seven stages of love” and he built on that theme via three-dimensional roses radiating from the model like a solar system, and in shimmering gold-beaded panels inspired by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt.
Mishra said “a couture buyer wants to go on a fantasy trip, wants to enjoy something unusual.” Couture is the driving force behind his business, as he creates a lot of outfits for Indian weddings. Since he started showing in Paris in 2020 his turnover has grown fivefold: “It was already growing, but obviously when you come to Paris, you feel challenged . . . you want to do better every season.”
In the notes to his final collection for Balenciaga, designer Demna Gvasalia, who goes professionally by Demna, addressed the idea of constantly striving to do better, saying in the show notes, “I have come as close as possible to being satisfied in this endless pursuit of impossible perfection — the defining ethos of Cristóbal Balenciaga.”
Demna starts as artistic director of Gucci later this month, and this swansong had a greatest hits vibe. Demna described it as “couture renditions of archetypal garments”, adding that couture “needs to exist outside the ballroom.”
So there were business and formal suits made to measure on a bodybuilder and worn by models of different heights and shapes, so that jackets hung off shoulders and trousers pooled around their feet. There were also skirt suits and eveningwear that acknowledged Balenciaga’s heritage, each with an amped-up element: tailored jackets came with exaggerated lapels and shoulders, a black evening dress was cut with a funnel neck.
Kim Kardashian modelled a silk slip dress and a coat made of embroidered feathers resembling a mink coat in an ode to Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on A Hot Tin Roof. Other famous faces appeared on the catwalk, including model Naomi Campbell, and actors Isabelle Huppert and Sunnyi Melles, who played an out-of-touch billionaire in Triangle of Sadness, a film satirising wealth and fashion.
Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts sat front row alongside Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who drew attention to the couture world (for better or worse) when she wore dresses by Schiaparelli and Dolce & Gabbana for her wedding in Venice last month. Sánchez Bezos told me, “[Couture] is very new to me. When I was younger I would look at the dresses in Vogue, and my mum and I would go to the sewing shop and buy designs that were close to that and try and make them ourselves. Will I buy more? I haven’t been to many shows but I enjoy it, I’m having fun.”
Fun, or at least humour, is synonymous with Dutch duo Viktor & Rolf, and this season’s collection riffed on the Angry Birds game franchise. Puffer dresses, their feathers escaping from the seams, were finer than they first appeared: they were made of satin, and the 11,500 “feathers” were handcrafted from fabric.
If feathers were the motif at Viktor & Rolf, at Chanel it was the wheat stalk. A golden ear of wheat was laid on each seat, apparently symbolising nature and abundance. So a tweed skirt suit had a rustic texture, suggesting woven straw, and a long tweed coat dress came with rough stitching at the cuffs with wheat dangling from them, in detailing that was slightly too close to haute scarecrow. More successful was a wedding dress with wheat embroidery at the neck, but overall the silhouettes could benefit from streamlining and lightening up.
While many clients order gowns for special occasions, such as weddings, other garments have the potential to elevate the everyday. A perfectly fitting jacket for work, for example. “Haute couture is doing extremely well, with many clients attending the shows and placing orders right after,” Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion at Chanel, observed. “This is a testament to our clients’ desire to incorporate exceptional pieces into their everyday lives.”
Giorgio Armani did not take a bow at the end of his Armani Privé show this season; he was home recovering from a bout of ill health. His collection, too, would have benefited from some streamlining — it was bogged down by bows and other superfluous decorations, where the Armani precision cut should speak for itself. The best pieces were the simplest, such as a black velvet strapless dress.
This week did play host to one big debut: that of Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela. Succeeding a legendary designer like John Galliano is no easy task. However Martens managed to host a show that sent shivers down the spine.
A below-ground series of rooms were papered with collages, making the show space feel like an atelier-meets-mausoleum. Models wore featureless masks made of metallic leather and upcycled jewellery in tribute to house founder Martin Margiela, who used masks in his 1989 catwalk debut.
As the Smashing Pumpkins soundtrack kicked in, gold dresses took on curious walnut-like organic forms, with fabric rippling over the face. A black corset dress in hand-painted canvas came with a cape at the front and crystals inside a high collar, for a sort of grim reaper does the Oscars look. Biker jackets made from upcycled leather and painted with designs from 16th-century Flemish wallpaper had a distressed look that suggested faded grandeur and decay.
One negative was corsetry, which highlighted models’ hip bones in what seems like a step backwards for embracing healthier body shapes. The first look was also disturbing: a model in a clear plastic strapless dress and mask which evoked dry cleaning bags and suggested suffocation. Otherwise it was a bold debut with a dystopian power. Who will be avant-garde enough to wear it?
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