Paris sizzles with couture catwalk
STARS were out in full force at the Paris Couture Week for the 2017/18 edition with models spotted in outfits that ranged from chic to the understated to avant-garde. A surprising number of ready-to-wear labels were in the lineup along with mainstays like Chanel and Dior.
Top US brands prefer Paris
IN a blow to New York fashion week, two high-end US labels also made their bow on the couture catwalk alongside A.F. Vandevorst as guest members.
Rodarte, a red-carpet favorite for Hollywood royalty like Natalie Portman and singer Katy Perry, said the label now intends to hold all its shows in Paris.
Set up by sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy at their mother’s kitchen table in Los Angeles, Rodarte’s debut Paris collection mixed their take on biker gear with ethereal silk organza and pixie flamenco frills.
Gold and silver bows turned up on the waist of a string of pieces in the unapologetically pretty spring summer collection which was dominated by flower motifs.
Feathered frond jackets and trouser suits that almost seemed to be made of stamens were littered through the line-up.
New York-based Proenza Schouler also chose to show its spring/summer ready to wear 2018 collection rather than the autumn/winter range most other brands were presenting.
Lazaro Hernandez, one half of the design duo, said they had been talking about making the move to Paris for years.
While the Mulleavys insisted it was the French capital’s view of fashion as art that had attracted them, Hernandez said Paris “has always been the most inspiring city for us.
“We came over and we searched all these independent Parisian ateliers where they do feather work, hand weaving textiles, ribbons (and so on), and we employed all these amazing little studios and worked back and forth from New York to Paris.”
Boundaries are blurred
The boundaries of global fashion weeks are increasingly becoming blurred.
Paris menswear week saw womenswear designs ubiquitous on runways, and both Givenchy and Saint Laurent have decided to show menswear in the womenswear shows this fall.
Now, New York Fashion Week ready-to-wear houses are unveiling their spring-summer 2018 designs during Paris couture week where fall-winter 2017 designs are being showcased.
But how is this calendar chaos sitting with fashion industry insiders?
“I think we’re entering transformation and change in the industry as a whole. Fashion is being reorganized and we’re really in the throes of it,” veteran fashion writer Jessica Michault said.
She said the immediacy of digital age has changed how brands and buyers view the fashion calendar with images instantaneously available online sometimes a year ahead of when the styles hit the shops.
Ralph & Russo lack focus
IN a white shoulderless halterneck, actress Zendaya joined “Fast and Furious” star Michelle Rodriguez in a silken teal coat dress to add star power to the Ralph & Russo front row.
It was perhaps a welcome boost to a collection that was hard to pin down.
Tamara Ralph’s designs are a red carpet favorite — and no doubt some looks, like an asymmetrical pastel plum satin gown that unfurled around the bust, will be a big hit. But the collection — which moved between varying pastel shades — seemed to lack focus at times.
Big Ottoman-style cone hats, strapped under the chin, defined many of the shimmering gowns doused with lashings of embroideries and sequins.
Then, there were the feathers.
Plumes shot out from large shoulder sections, down a cinched 60s skirt, across the arm like a bird’s wing, and then down the chest on one black-and-silver, traffic-stopping gown that evoked a peacock with its tail feathers down.
There were plenty of great dramatic moments — including an off-white feather hat that might have been the pick of the late Elizabeth Taylor.
Dior fashion show celebrates 70 years of travelling spirit
FRENCH fashion house Christian Dior marked its 70th anniversary on Monday with a show staged outside the Invalides museum in Paris and inspired by its founder’s travels around the world.
On a fern-lined catwalk dotted with wooden lions and giraffes, designer Maria Grazia Chiuri presented the brand’s Autumn-Winter 2017/18 haute couture collection, revisiting the iconic “Bar” Jacket and grey skirt suits with a 1950s feel.
“Christian Dior travelled across the world since 1947. This time we made the five continents come to Paris,” Dior CEO and Chairman Sidney Toledano said after the show.
Chiuri was named as its first female creative director in July 2016 as Dior sought to connect with younger consumers and boost sales hit by the global luxury spending downturn and growing appetite for smaller and more local brands.
Monday’s show presented her second Haute Couture collection for Dior, which she joined from Valentino.
Toledano said his new creative director had attracted younger clients from Asia, where demand for luxury goods is picking up, while retaining existing customers.
To celebrate its 70th anniversary, Christian Dior is also taking over Les Arts Decoratifs museum in Paris for a lavish retrospective from July 5 to January 7.
It will feature over 300 dresses from the house founder and the six designers who succeeded him.
Iris Van Herpen hits 10 years, goes aquatic
CELEBRATING 10 years at the helm of her fashion house, lauded conceptual couture designer Iris Van Herpen took a watery trip down memory lane for her mesmerizing, aquatic couture spectacle.
The near-illusionist backdrop had guests reaching for their cameras.
Van Herpen has a penchant for the dramatic and Monday’s show did not disappoint: Musicians were encased inside a water-filled tank with instruments to accompany the collection.
The water theme dripped out into the surreal, brooding couture creations that revisited the Dutch wunderkind’s signature fusion of organic forms with technology and mechanics. White gowns, constructed of tendrils or fibers, provoked myriad interpretations — evoking simultaneously the lines of a sound wave, the rippling sea or the gills of a fish.
The silhouettes were varied but infused with large Asian-style sleeves and exaggerated proportions.
Motifs on a floor-length Asian-style gown resembled fossils buried at the bottom of the sea, while a curved front panel of a skirt jutted out three-dimensionally like the silvery, metallic fins of a fish.
Chanel aims high with ‘Eiffel Tower’ Paris show
THEY call him the “kaiser,” and Karl Lagerfeld came as close as you can come to being crowned king of Paris on Tuesday when the French capital awarded the fashion designer its highest honor.
The 83-year-old was given the Grand Vermeil medal by mayor Anne Hidalgo, who called the legendary German-born creator “an immense talent and a wonderful person.”
“Paris loves you — you are Paris,” she told him under a massive 38-meter model of the Eiffel Tower that Lagerfeld built as the centerpiece of his Chanel haute couture show.
“I am a foreigner and we foreigners see Paris and France with another eye,” he told a cheering crowd that included American singer Katy Perry and British actresses Tilda Swinton and Cara Delevingne.
Lagerfeld said that a “new day is dawning in France” after the election of President Emmanuel Macron, its youngest head of state in more than a century.
Lagerfeld’s Chanel show under the dome of the Grand Palais, dominated by his Eiffel Tower, was a celebration of Paris, with a small army of more than 60 of the world’s top models on the runway.
The designer went strong on Chanel’s classic tweed look with subtly inset crystals for his winter coats and suits. Shoulders were much more rounded, and all the models bar the final bride wore brimmed hats somewhere between a boater and a bowler.
As at Dior the day before, Lagerfeld went for more sombre grey hues, mixing them with black, purple and dark blue tones, lifted by the reflective sheen of tiny inlaid crystals and ankle and knee-length boots.
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