Author: Angelo Flaccavento
PARIS — Couture as soliloquy or dialogue? A designer’s flight of fancy or a tool for the wealthiest of women’s lives? Clothes to wear or objects destined for museums? These were some of the questions coursing through the shows this week in Paris as haute couture entered a new era, with new designers bringing their perspectives to a venerable old art.Couture is relevant. There’s no doubt about that. As one of the last remnants of old world hierarchy, with its occasions and protocols, couture is in demand as a new world of privilege asserts itself: the ultimate signifier in a…
PARIS — Nakedness is intimacy, truth, vulnerability. Dressing is how we prepare ourselves to confront the world, playing the part we have chosen or that was bestowed upon us. In the Saint Laurent men’s collection presented tonight in the oh-so-masterful atrium of the Fondation Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce museum, Anthony Vaccarello reflected on dressing and undressing, and the moment when one gives way to the other, using James Baldwin’s 1956 novel “Giovanni’s Room” and its unfiltered depiction of homoerotic love as a starting point. Ever prone to reduction, Vaccarello kept things tight: the palette strict and the silhouette vertical, yet…
PARIS — It’s all about having a POV nowadays, but the proliferation of opinions — in the public sphere and within brands, with the rise of merchandisers, marketing directors, and other ancillary figures to the creative director — hasn’t led to clarity. On the contrary, fashion is living through a moment of messiness: too many voices, no real point of view. The men’s fashion week that closed on Sunday in Paris was proof.A few designers delivered well-formed messages, but they were the exception. There were plenty of collections built around characters but that too often resulted in designers haphazardly sending…
PARIS — Clothes for life or clothes as costumes? The opening days of the men’s fashion week that kicked off in Paris had plenty of both.Monday and Tuesday were marked by the supersized productions of LVMH, a company whose biggest fashion brands tend to favour grand entertainment to extract profit from today’s société du spectacle and its attention economy. Product is key but it is the storytelling that imbues it with added value.Dior designer Jonathan Anderson is no stranger to brand building. But his urge to create something rather than simply market it feels stubborn. Set in the Musée Rodin…
MILAN — To say that the moment we are living is uneasy is an understatement. How to cope with scenarios that change abruptly, with dystopia that’s become permanent and anxiety the only state of mind? When discomfort is our perpetual condition, looking back offers an easy answer. Things that have endured for years, decades, even centuries reassure us. That’s the power of a collective archive: the classics, in short.The Milan fashion weekend that ended on Monday was all about classicism: not an exercise in nostalgia nor a recycling of anachronisms, but as a means to imagine the present anew without…
FLORENCE — Menswear is tribal. It’s all about opposing clans, affiliation, codes of conduct, fed on the eternal tensions between old and new, right and wrong. In today’s world of growing divisions — heated rivalry? — this was perhaps more pronounced at the latest installment of Pitti Uomo. Indeed, there are many ways to be a man today, and clothes reflect that.What hits you straightaway at Pitti are the attendees: We saw “goths vs sarts, trads vs retros, preppies vs sneakerheads,” as Scott “The Sartorialist” Schuman put it in one of his posts on the de facto catwalk that is…
PARIS — Fashion’s big season of change came to a close on Tuesday night in Paris. It will likely be remembered as one of the most heavily debated, and divisive, moments in the history of the modern fashion industry. But amid the drama of designers swapping houses with each other, change itself was somewhat elusive.Fashion brands across the land have long been shaped by the work of Phoebe Philo. Now, a kind of Miu Miu-fication is underway. But the fashion scene remains largely stale, in part due to the recirculation of the same creative directors. And, let’s face it, each…
PARIS — In the era of the Ozempic body, the waist is making a comeback and corsetry, or abstractions of it, were front and centre on the fourth day of Paris Fashion Week.Corsets were the only tie to the past that Miguel Castro Freitas kept as he made his debut at the house of Mugler: no camp, no humour, very little in the way of glamour and pas de soubrettes. Rather, what we got was a sense of womanly rigour (with some marabou on top), a taste for the covered up (give or take some transparencies and one flimsy dress held up by nipple piercings, which was a direct reference to the archive), an appetite for construction and the notion that clothing can resculpt the body…
MILAN — A celebration fit for a king: The final day of Milan Fashion Week was entirely focussed on Giorgio Armani. It was an emotional closure. Armani’s show was held in the magnificent courtyard of the Accademia di Brera rather than one of the brand’s usual venues. It would have been special in any case: Initially planned as a 50th anniversary celebration for the label, the show was accompanied by a retrospective exhibition titled “Giorgio Armani: Milano, per amore” in the Pinacoteca di Brera museum. The exhibition displays an expansive selection of dresses taken from five decades of Armani’s collections,…
MILAN — A celebration fit for a king: The final day of Milan Fashion Week was entirely focussed on Giorgio Armani. It was an emotional closure. Armani’s show was held in the magnificent courtyard of the Accademia di Brera rather than one of the brand’s usual venues. It would have been special in any case: Initially planned as a 50th anniversary celebration for the label, the show was accompanied by a retrospective exhibition titled “Giorgio Armani: Milano, per amore” in the Pinacoteca di Brera museum. The exhibition displays an expansive selection of dresses taken from five decades of Armani’s collections,…