PARIS FASHION WEEK: Giambattista Valli
Any fashion historian knows that in the 1950s there were, essentially, two overriding silhouettes: a highly-constricted waist, ample breasts, softly-sloping shoulders and a to-the-knee skirt either hobble-slim or massively buoyed with frou-frou petticoats. Night or day, town or country, that was your lot. It was pretty much the same story today at Giambattista Valli, a designer whose work always has a couture bent and who this season looked to the fifties heydays of Dior, Fath and Balenciaga. From Dior, Valli took the New Look, in its acres of debutante skirts and overriding, overarching (and occasionally overpowering) femininity. From Fath, a love of asymmetry and dramatic uses of cloth with obliquely-placed bows, peep-over collars and massed carnations decorating bodices and skirts. From Balenciaga, he took the cocooning silhouettes and slightly looser sacque shapes he has been playing with for a few seasons. Sometimes, Valli's mixes of couture past and pret-a-present fall flat on their faces, and sometimes they work. This, luckily, was one of the latter occasions. There was a light, sugary sense of femininity to the collection, enhanced by the bon-bon sweet sorbet shades of rose-beige, lemon and vanilla fondant used in delicate fabrics that still had the body to weightlessly hold Valli's ambitious shapes. There were - again - high-piled chignons, but this time they were more Madame de Pompadour than Marie Antoinette, lower, chicer and far less ostentatious. The Versailles flavour was picked up by courtly knee-breeches, worn with silken jackets slightly inflated at the hip, but rendered in black like mere shadows of the eighteenth century. Indeed, if this was Madame de la Marquise, she had met Marnie somewhere, as there was more than a touch of the clean, brittle chic of a Hitchcock heroine flexing on hauteur-than-haute heels in the tight and spare silhouettes.Fussiness was confined to the decoration, and even then Valli's sparing use of print and trademark self-fabric ruffles felt precious and yet restrained. And, in a season when so many designers have worked themselves into a tricksy frenzy and let all their better insticts be trounced by a flounce, Valli's easy way with ruching and gathering fabric into decorative milles-feuilles stood out - quite literally in his pumped, plumped but still controlled debutante circle-skirts. The finale of half-a-dozen frou-frou all-over-beribboned floor-length trained ballgowns had no sense of restraint at all, gorged as it was with the overblown Scarlett O'Hara school of sock-it-to-me femininity Valli so adores. But we can allow Valli to overindulge himself on the sweet stuff when the result of all that gorging is quite so gorgeous.