SPRING COLLECTIONS PARIS : Season of Reruns
At one end of town, Lamine Kouyate has spray-painted Funkin’ Fashion Factory outside his door, in an abandoned children’s hospital now inhabited by artists. This new designer from Mali is showing his spring Xuly-Bet collection here, and the fashion industry, which usually sticks close to the Louvre, is interested.
At the other, Hollywood director Robert Altman is taking front-row seats in the museum’s courtyard, where the top designers are showing their lines. He is researching a movie, “Pret-a-Porter,” about the French ready-to-wear world. And the industry is even more interested in that.
Somewhere between these two spectacles falls the other fashion news. In short, skirts are flared and cut just above the knee or the ankle. Jackets curve at the waist and cover the hips; some are slit from hem to waist, and the pieces fly when the models walk. Colors are classic ivory, black, navy and gray, with pastels mixed in. And pants have moved from center stage to the sideline.
But that’s it for the news.
That Altman of Hollywood and Kouyate of Africa are stealing some thunder here says something about French fashion. Designers seem to be taking a break. More than one collection previewed this week was built on a single new idea. If that.
It was most apparent where it was least expected--at the Karl Lagerfeld show. Usually a hothouse of invention, this time he introduced one item: a stocking-like first layer called “the skin dress.” It covered the knees and stretched to the elbows. Over it, sometimes under it, Lagerfeld added suits with short, asymmetric skirts, dresses in small prints, sports-bra tops or stretchy short skirts.
Models with hair lacquered to towering heights and a black pencil line drawn from forehead to chin weren’t enough to fill in the gaps. Lagerfeld might have accomplished the same thing by sending one model in a skin dress down the runway and announcing, “Wear this with everything I’ve ever made.”
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If this was a case of the underdeveloped collection, Chloe, another Lagerfeld label, was a case of the overexposed. Models wore sheer, spliced dresses that floated like so many streamers around a Maypole. The idea was to update Greek goddess wear, but even those free spirits would have had a hard time getting out of the house in some of these clothes. Sobriety took the form of A-line dresses modest enough to satisfy Zeus in his most paternal mood.
At least Martin Margiela was honest. “I didn’t feel like doing new things this season,” he said with a shrug. Reruns from the past 10 years make up his spring line. About half the clothes were cut from recycled fabric, and all of them were cut from original patterns. Everything is overdyed in deep gray, so prints or patterns show through. Rib-knit tunics, grandfather’s tweed vests, peacoats, long wrap skirts made of silky dress lining and waif dresses in patchwork fabrics are the heart of the collection.
In the abandoned market where Margiela, dressed in white smock, met the press and buyers, Los Angeles boutique owner Charles Gallay explained his take on it.
“Fashion is changing,” he said, noting that Margiela has winter sweaters and coats in this spring line. “It’s one world, and it’s clothes. That is modern thinking.”
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Kouyate is closer in attitude to the avant-garde Margiela than to the couture designers showing at the Louvre. His Xuly-Bet (pronounced Zooley-Bet) tank dresses have seams on the outside. His white shirts serve as jackets, too. Silk-jersey fabrics and two dominant colors, red and white, make the wardrobe choices simple. The prices are about $400 per item. At the very least, this label is the flavor of the month. New York City’s Henri Bendel recently announced it will feature Xuly-Bet among its best young designer labels.
Strong showings by blue-chip designers this week included Valentino’s evening dresses of chiffon and lace. In navy, ivory or floral prints, they were as feminine and graceful as can be.
Sharon Stone wore the bride’s dress in this show. Off the runway, she has been modeling Valentino clothes at all the major Hollywood parties lately.
Christian Dior’s Latin-flavored line featured black leather jackets with white-stitched belts, Spanish silver medallions on evening wear, and one Sunbelt-yellow skirt in pleated chiffon worn with a sequined leopard bra for a fiery show of style. Italian designer Gianfranco Ferre has forged a definite look for the house of Dior. This season it seemed to be catching on.
Emanuel Ungaro cut suits in three soft layers, with an A-line jacket and a tunic top over narrow pants. Often, the outfits had an ethnic flavor, created by strands of small wooden beads, dome-shaped knit caps or scarves wrapped around the caps to suggest a sultan’s hat. He showed watercolored print tunics over pants for dressier times in one of his more subtle collections in recent memory.
Claude Montana’s new wife, Wallace Franken, was the first model down his runway. Strong, asymmetric-shaped black and white suits and soft layers of ivory pants, tunics and jackets with Indian embroidered borders were two strengths in this collection.
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At the trade show in the Tuillerie Gardens, next to the Louvre, two young Croatian designers, Nino Pavlek and Jasmina Pacek, showed their first collection in the West. Modest rayon lingerie and sleepwear filled the racks out front. The clothes were not the point here. This was about a dream.
“We showed our collection to Barneys and they said, ‘It’s too much prints,’ ” explained Pavlek. “Americans don’t like prints.” Back to the drawing board for a duo that the fashion world is certain to hear from again.
On one level, Pavlek and Pacek played to Altman’s take on the Paris happenings.
“I’m not interested in whether the fashions are successful or not,” the director said, waiting for the Montana show to start, an hour late. “I’m looking at the soup, the mix in all its seriousness and silliness. The models, the attitudes. And the mistakes. The little things that make it all human.”
How the fashion models, editors and retailers feel about Altman’s close-up look at their world is another story.
Tune in again.
Next: The Paris collections of Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and Romeo Gigli.
