Valentino.Fall 2014 Couture

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was a Victorian painter who liked to depict archaeological fantasies of scantily draped girls lounging around Roman villas. Had he been alive today and at the Valentino couture show, he’d hardly been able to contain himself. Every one of the looks Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli sent out were inspired by the works of Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets, but first among them was a white draped tunic dress named after Alma-Tadema’s sultry study of a sleeping nymph, The Siesta, of 1868.

 

Forget historical exactitude, though. This collection was about a pair of Roman fashion designers conjuring up lyrical impressions of the ancient Imperial days of their own city, and building them into a new fantasy, from the delicately cross-laced Roman sandals up. “It’s our past we’re thinking about,” said Chiuri. “Something graceful, regal and a bit more pagan, this time.”

The clever combination of romance and relevance that is coming out of Valentino these days seems completely instinctive and unforced. On the one hand, there’s a grounded sense of how young women want to dress (it’s pretty handy that Chiuri has her eighteen-year-old daughter Rachele for reality checks) and on the other, there are the superb technical abilities which put the house in the category of up-there-on-clouds excellence.

 That sensible sensibility has already brought the long, lace Renaissance-inspired dress to fashion. It continues for fall with breathtakingly complex silver beaded embroidery, trailing in layers, and wondrous gilded gowns with tabard bodices.

But the new thing is simplicity—or rather, silhouettes which are unencumbered by any surface decoration. It’s a truism in fashion that these things are even more difficult to accomplish than any amount of froth and beading. Yet there’s absolutely no panic about that at Valentino. 

The stark, noble toga dresses and subtly dramatic constructs of draped and knotted silk in this collection carry the hallmarks of perfectionism that has been native to this house ever since Mr. 

Valentino Garavani set it up in the fifties. The upshot: What we’re seeing here is the gradual reaching out to different kinds of women—or maybe it’s the same women, in a different mood. 

And whichever way we look at it, Chiuri and Piccioli are turning their Roman couture fantasy into business reality. Such is the success of their work that they say they’ve taken on 30 more people in their couture ateliers to meet the growing demand.

Armani Privé . Fall 2014 Couture

Sophia Loren sat down next to Jared Leto at the center of the VIP section, wearing a red crystal-embroidered dress engineered over her still-impressive curves.

 Just down the row was little Chloë Moretz, wearing a cloudy gray chiffon top, also sparkling with crystals. 

Who knows how deliberately these things are orchestrated, but by coincidence or not, they were about to watch an Armani Privé collection for fall which was entirely in black, white, and red. “Three basic colors, tone on tone,” Mr. Armani said.

 

The first third explored Armani’s tailoring—short swing coats, sometimes over shorts, a pantsuit with a geometric bell cut into the sleeves, and jackets with fluted peplums. 

 Flashes of strong lacquer red (an echo of Armani’s abiding love of Asia) built through the collection until it was fully out there in long evening dresses of the sleekness that endears so many movie stars to Mr. Armani.

Still, he wasn’t in the mood for sticking to the predictable straight and narrow this season. There was a distinct aura of whimsy—or call it dottiness—about the way he started to whip up meters of tulle into skirts as densely frilled as pom-poms, and add headdresses and net veils smothered with red or black polka dots. 

Part playful, part a nod to a classic trope of fifties haute couture imagery, the veiling eventually grew to cover one or two models, and their dresses, entirely. When the finale dressed appeared—including a black dress with multiple white dots under a black-and-white spotted veil—the model looked as if she’d been caught up in a snowstorm on a winter’s night. In a nice way.

Fall 2014 Couture.Maison Martin Margiela

One connecting theme has come out of Paris this week—the way major designers have been going back over the history of haute couture: for example, both Raf Simons at Christian Dior and Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel wended their ways back to eighteenth-century court dress, and returned with reinterpretations exquisitely remade for modern princesses. Amusingly, this puts Maison Martin Margiela in a plum position this season, since this house was actually founded on the repurposing and reframing of old, vintage, historical things (often including trash) in cool, wearable ways. So: bright and early on Wednesday morning, the audience at the Margiela “Artisanal” show was not given a reproduction of the work of the seminal Parisian couturier Paul Poiret, but confronted by a piece of the actual thing, a beautiful faded brocade vest whose provenance was explained in the program as “Probably part of a costume for an Oriental party given by Denise and Paul Poiret. . . . ” It dates from about 1910, and with forensically transparent accuracy, is noted to have been bought this year in an auction at Drouot in Paris—Lot 26, to be precise. Without a glance at the notes, however, it was the one thing in the collection the women in the room craned their necks to look at and (you can feel these things in the moment) envied most.
 

Still, that one piece opens up yet another maze of questions and contradictions. Margiela’s “Artisanal” line isn’t officially haute couture at all. Martin Margiela, when he was operating in the nineties, was interested only in elevating cheap, available flea-market items and transforming them into clothes for an egalitarian intelligentsia who enjoyed his antiestablishment subtexts and subtle jokes about fashion.

 The way Margiela patched in the past was fully in the French “bricolage” tradition—a rough-edged method which was termed “deconstruction” in the nineties. As excellent as it always was, the whole point was the way it was calculated to be outsider; deliberately the kind of clothing rich people would never want or understand.

The baton has now been passed to a younger team, which is operating in a new commerical reality more than twenty years after Margiela began. Probably their customers now are members of the art world—the women who dress to stand out as avant-garde as they negotiate multimillion-dollar transactions in the gallery booths of Miami Art Basel and the Frieze fairs in London and New York. 

Against that particular social backdrop, this collection makes complete sense. It still looks rough and ready. It is composed of mad things like defunct coins as embroidery, and vintage late forties Japanese souvenir bomber jackets. In 2014, there’s a whole new type of supermoneyed art and music people in the world who value cool over convention. And maybe, they’ll be looking here.

Jean Paul Gaultier/Spring 2014 Couture

“Life is a butterfly! So all the collection is that!” explained Jean Paul Gaultier during a preview on the eve of his couture show, which used the simple metaphor and seemingly single idea to build a collection that proved to be brimming with playful reinterpretations of those winged beauties and rich with inventive technique and craftsmanship.

 

The collection opened with “Les Papillons Noirs”—chic black suits in Gaultier’s signature 1940s manner with pencil skirts or cigarette pants. Those shapely jackets, however, had necklines or revers that morphed and unfurled into fluttering wings—sometimes echoed in the stand-away silhouette of the skirt’s pocket flaps.


A satin organza blouse with wind-flapped batwing sleeves was paired with a sleek black skirt, and lacquered lace with an abstracted butterfly motif was used for siren sheath dresses.


Gaultier dubbed his girls the “Papillons de Paris,” and those chic ladies were soon transformed to reflect another aspect of the City of Light: “By night, she becomes a showgirl!” laughed Gaultier who, to emphasize his point, dressed burlesque diva Dita Von Teese in a Mr. Pearl corseted creation, drawing all eyes to her hand-span wasp waist. The elaborate evening looks were crowned with Folies Bergère–style plumed headdresses that bobbed along like fanciful insect antennae.


Some gowns had panniers suggesting a cocoon, while others seemed trapped within a lepidopterist’s net—playful ideas that belied the workmanship behind them. One such coat, for example, required 600 meters of silk tulle laboriously twisted into cords of graduated thickness that were then woven together to create the illusion of a catcher’s mesh. There was more netting in overscale embroiderer’s canvas, painstakingly worked with motifs of—yes, you guessed it!


Gaultier used his celebrated draped-jersey technique (developed by the legendary Madame Grès and brought to his atelier by one of her former workroom directors) to suggest those beauteous insects, finishing the wings with bands of airy organza so that they ruffled in the breeze.


Leather was treated with iridescent coating—suggesting the shimmering wings of a morpho butterfly, or the scarab shells that were used to embroider a pale tulle cardigan suit. 

A 1920 tango dress was printed in the rich orange patterns of a monarch butterfly, but there was a dark touch of the moth to punk-inspired leather and denim biker jackets, trimmed with custom Swarowski studs that glimmered like the aurora borealis.


In Gaultier’s cavernous show space, it was all glittering showtime on the runway, but in the hand these pieces dazzle with the intricacy of their workmanship.