Menkes, Suzy; 'Story of the season: Restoring beauty', International Herald Tribune, 9th October 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/09/opinion/rparis10.php
From the triumph of the little white dress to the banishing of the raw seams and dissonant structures, a clear message came from the spring/summer 2006 shows, which closed on Monday: restoring beauty.
But how different designers find beauty - in simplicity, in embellishment or, in the case of John Galliano, in perversity - has been the story of the Paris season, which closes on Monday.
Inevitably, to create a fresh identity, designers are glancing back to a different era when a Mozartian harmony reined in a woman's wardrobe and the only challenge was to find a new song on the same rhythm.
That is also the mission of Stefano Pilati, who sent out his third collection for YSL Rive Gauche on Sunday - and made his focus just that embellishment that a purist designer might have shunned. Pom poms edged skirts, ruffles plunged from waist to hem and gathered at the neck - although Pilati kept all this under control with a slender silhouette for pants and skirts.
It is a long time since the fashion icon Diana Vreeland announced that "elegance is refusal." But there were times in this show, when you could see her point. Pilati's ornament was often pretty, but the architecture of its base was not solid or radical enough to support the flourishes. Taking as a template cropped pants, the models, their hair drawn back into curly ponytails and their feet on hefty, thick-soled shoes, walked down the wine red runway. Maybe it was the sunlight pouring through the glass roof of the Grand Palais, but Pilati seemed to offer little to excite. A fine-knit cardigan worn over the shoulders with its arms binding a ruffled blouse or a matador-style tuxedo, with pompoms edging the pants, were small contributions to the fashion world.
At Chloé, the designer Phoebe Philo made such an emphatic statement about the dress that she put a definite end to her signature look of frilly, girlie top and snug pants.
"Why dresses? Because I am bored with trousers," said Philo, although she took her bow wearing jeans. Chloé paid tribute to summer innocents in snow white dresses, often with a high waist and bouncing baby doll layers. As the models came out on high wooden wedge heels, they looked like midsummer marionettes.
What made this seem adorable rather than silly was the quality of the workmanship, as dresses came out with appliquéd flowers, with embellishment built into the fabric or with more light layers than a wedding cake. The way that Philo played with the new volumes was accomplished and she caught in the lightness and whiteness a sense of summer.
The natural successor to Yves Saint Laurent is Jean Paul Gaultier, whose Hermès show reached such a level of beauty, harmony and elegance that it was difficult to believe that it came from fashion's one-time bad boy. The setting was a runway draped in white cloth with fringed white awnings overhead. It spoke of summer - even before the orange of a midday sun translated into Hermès orange for gloves, for a new flat bag or for a belt that fastened a simple dress.
The show was about perfection, very bourgeois and correct, whether it was a ginger suede jacket or a pristine cotton shirt dress.
"And Greece - that's very important," said Gaultier backstage, referring to pleated dresses draped gracefully to fall knee or ankle length.
Was it too perfect? Yes, for fashion excitement, but not for the Hermès client who is sensitive to the real, unshowy luxury of the finest fabrics. Even when Gaultier made the playful addition of a Toile de Jouy silk, etched with palm trees or black lace spelling out Hermès in its pattern, each piece was the height of elegance. And this came from top to toe: Hermès scarves scrunched in a hair bun or twisted into the ties of espadrilles. Only one tiny touch of the mischievous Gaultier came through: a lace parasol where the handle was a whip.
Is this the fashion moment for warrior queens in curvy tailoring as sharp as a compass point; or for Grecian tunics cinched with leather harnesses? Alexander McQueen thinks so. He carried his show of Glamazon models by force of energy. But turn the pounding music off and what was there? An image that Azzdedine Alaļa created in the 1980s when the power woman look was a challenge to spacey flower children and a genuine reflection of burgeoning feminism.
The collection, played out in black and white with touches of silver and gold, included taut tailoring with tiny, fluting skirts, gilded chains filling in a scoop front or a goddess gown suspended from a silver harness. But at a moment when women are reasserting their right to look simply beautiful, McQueen's premise went against the movement toward fashion grace.
Valentino does not have to be cajoled into taking beauty as his mantra. And he has understood the power of the white dress since he first showed in Florence 35 years ago. For a moment, it seemed that Sunday's collection would re-create that fresh, spanking whiteness - but with separate pieces from narrow pants, perhaps given one sparkling jeans pocket at the back, and worn with flat ballerina pumps. The top halves were blouses which, with their billowing sleeves or shoulder tucks, were stars of the show.
The designer said backstage that he loved white for its summer freshness. But he also loves ruffles (which were even made into heart shapes on evening gowns) and roses. They were not offered as modern computer manipulated prints, but traditional floral patterns on evening dresses for a full-blown beauty.
John Galliano's discomforting show was about seeing the beauty in the misshapen - not the clothes, but the people. Culling from what would have been burlesque performers in the days when freak shows were in fashion, Galliano sent some of his signature pretty dresses and a lot of other stuff on couples as odd as the goth fiancés Dita Von Teese and Marilyn Manson sitting front row. Faced with the freaks - people of restricted growth, a hugely fat woman, male couples, transvestites, aging women with their young gigolos, the reaction was an uneasy silence - even if these weird models seemed happy and confident in their role. The show ended with a marionette of Galliano walking the runway along with the designer in a Sex Pistols punk T-shirt. The show could be taken as a self-indulgent romp or a witty take on beauty. Either way, it did not do much for Galliano's clothes.
Martin Margiela had also latched on to the beautiful. As the soundtrack trilled "Love is in the Air," trolleys were propelled down rails with models preening on board.
A lot has changed in Margiela's fashion life since Diesel bought the company and gave it the means to develop the brand. So why not expand the tentative jewelry line? Great globules of color - mauve, turquoise, cherry red - circled necks and arms above tailored pantsuits and white dresses. Until they started to melt - and then this ice-cube ornamentation bled over the clothes as a surreal defect. The clothes were perfectly lovely - yet deliberately incomplete. And again, the evasive designer seemed to be poking fun at himself and the cult he created 15 years ago of finding beauty in the unfinished. A pair of pants would have one elegant leg, with the other trailing a bale of cloth propped up in the cart as it whizzed around the track.
Margiela is a smart, witty designer - and if something of his passionate handwork was missing from this merry show: watch this space! The designer is planning to bring his sartorial surreality to the couture season in January.