PARIS — A designer has to have a certain amount of gumption to
not only title a fashion show “The Next Era” but to take the phrase and splash
it on tank tops, opera-length leather motor racing gloves and boots.
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Especially at a time like the present, when questions about the
end of an era are front of mind, and fears about what’s next have taken on a
freighted meaning.
Yet at Dior, title and splash Maria Grazia Chiuri did, to
surprisingly effective result (slogan tees aside).
She borrowed the phrase, she said in a preview, from Italian
artist Mariella Bettineschi — the latest in the designer’s series of female
change-makers — and a series of portraits by Bettineschi of the same name that
feature women appropriated from the work of old masters and recreated —
rendered the primary protagonists of their own stories and given two sets of
eyes.
Which is, after all, what designers such as Chiuri have to do
every time they take the helm of a heritage house: go back to the past and reinvent
it, over and over again, with a new point of view.
So multiples of Bettineschi’s portraits were hung around the
show space to frame, literally, the point, as Chiuri offered up her own
reengineering of history: Dior classics, infused or overlaid with wearable
tech.
Working with an Italian company, D-Air Lab, that specializes in
protective clothing for arctic explorers and extreme athletes (the first look
in the collection was a black bodysuit covered in venous-like tubing that
mimicked the company’s temperature-regulating “undersuit”), Chiuri pulled
internal safety padding out to create a strap-on corset atop a New Look
silhouette, added external white shoulder pads (they looked sort of like
football pads) to one boned lace dress and a vest to another. A gray Bar jacket
piped in black atop skinny gray trousers contained body temp-regulating tech
within its seams.
It could have gone badly wrong. Wearable tech is not, after all,
a new idea; around the time of the Apple Watch, fashion already went there, did
that, in a flirtation that did not end particularly well. And the strap-on gear
came with some weird dangly bits, which turned out to be wires used to inflate
the padding and looked a little silly.
But while Chiuri was originally interested in revealing the
architecture of the inside, the usually hidden wires and mechanics that
represent, after all, where technology and fashion intersect (both are about
construction and what the materials can do), the result looked like nothing so
much as personal protective equipment, though not the pandemic kind we have
recently known. The kind that may, rather, help the wearer navigate an
uncomfortable next era. Whatever it might bring.
Indeed, beyond the actual supplemental tech, the forms the tech
inspired — basket weave leather corsets shaping day dresses in tablecloth
checks and menswear grays; khaki and plaid Bar jackets with detachable quilted
nylon linings and matching gloves tucked into the pockets; cool motorcycle
leathers in primary shades; some gorgeous glistening jacquard puffers over
matching brocade trousers — looked modern.
Sometimes all it takes is considering the familiar through a
different lens, or a new point of view.
That’s what designers Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee of
Vaquera did by shifting their show from their home base of New York to
Paris.
The move rooted their aggro-school kid-provocateur “fashion fan fiction” (as
they called it in a news release) firmly in the tradition of fashion
subversives, glossed with a new level of polish as shiny as the clear ruffled
plastic that covered their lacy lingerie dresses, and as visible as the
supersize faded denim trousers or the floor-sweeping arms of gargantuan knits.
And it is what Anthony Vaccarello did at Saint Laurent, in a
terrific, tightly conceived show of nonchalant chic suspended on a razor’s
edge.
On the tension between no-nonsense outerwear — cashmere peacoats
and belted greatcoats, leather motorcycle jackets, swaddling curvy opera
jackets, giant fake furs (that’s genuinely next era) — and delicate evening
wear: bias-cut silks, wispy chiffons, sheer lace, ruched jersey.
Shoulders were broad; waists, narrow; lines, long and lean.
There was no frippery and almost no decoration, save armloads of gold and
silver bangles that seemed as much like armor as jewelry. There was a finale of
Le Smokings. Saint Laurent basics, in other words, cut with a contemporary ease
by a designer at ease with the weight of his inheritance, and with no pointless
distraction. No complicated straps or revealing bits or shoes that made it
impossible to walk.
The women in them looked entirely self-possessed. Secure in
their own skins. Ready to handle, in the most effective way, whatever does come
next. Really, that’s all anyone wants from their clothes.
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