Author: Tim Blanks

PARIS — After the dust had settled from Alessandro Michele’s extraordinary couture peepshow on Wednesday, I got to thinking about the obsession that Michele and dear departed Valentino shared with Hollywood. I imagined them as impressionable young Italians communing with secular gods and goddesses in the erotically charged darkness of a movie theatre where their fantasies transmogrified into the impulses that would drive them into the arms of fashion. “There is no fantasy without beauty,” Michele told me. “There is no beauty without fantasy. There is no freedom without beauty and fantasy.” I felt Andy Warhol, close friend of Valentino’s,…

PARIS — Matthieu Blazy’s sublime haute couture debut at Chanel had its unlikely roots in Japanese anime. The designer was struck to his soul by a haiku he came across. Bird on a mushroom. / I saw the beauty at once. / Then gone, flown away. “It was so poetic,” he mused during a preview. “Considering what’s happening around us every day, I thought maybe what couture can offer is a kind of parenthesis, like a dream, even if we manage a 20-minute escape and just throw poetry on the table. That was the idea: very simple, this bird on…

PARIS — Matthieu Blazy’s sublime haute couture debut at Chanel had its unlikely roots in Japanese anime. The designer was struck to his soul by a haiku he came across. Bird on a mushroom. / I saw the beauty at once. / Then gone, flown away. “It was so poetic,” he mused during a preview. “Considering what’s happening around us every day, I thought maybe what couture can offer is a kind of parenthesis, like a dream, even if we manage a 20-minute escape and just throw poetry on the table. That was the idea: very simple, this bird on…

PARIS — Deep-pocketed fashion wizardry transformed Dior’s showspace at the Musée Rodin from the velvet-curtained solemnity of last week’s menswear show to Monday’s upside down: a meadow of greensward and blossoming cyclamen on the ceiling, a floor of chrome parquet. Two versions of durability: one representing nature, the other manmade ingenuity. And you could just about see that as the core of Jonathan Anderson’s first haute couture collection for the house that he now has complete creative dominance over. We’ve seen his womenswear and menswear, and now, finally, the premiere of his vision for the pinnacle of the pyramid. Is…

PARIS — Véronique Nichanian is 71, but gives off the impression that she’s decades younger. Her simmering energy is palpable. When I ask her how she feels about aging, she casts her glasses to the ground in a gesture of mock-disgust. “I’m going to have an operation for my eyes, because I hate wearing these.”With Karl Lagerfeld’s death, her 38-year tenure at Hermès makes her the longest-serving creative director in Paris. “I remember after 10 years I said, ‘Oh mon Dieu, 10 years!’ And then it was 20 years and [then-CEO] Jean-Louis Dumas wrote me a letter, and I said,…

“Valentino: Live a hundred years!” That was the fervent wish of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the designer’s most famous client, in 1966.He almost made it. Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani died today at the age of 93. He managed to outlive Jackie, and also his rivals Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, with whom he was so often linked. Women’s Wear Daily had names for them all. Yves the King, Karl the Kaiser, Valentino the Chic. But the documentary that was released about him in 2008, the year he retired, bequeathed Valentino another, more enduring title: the Last Emperor. It was the…

LONDON — The word is that Antony Price’s heart gave out while he was seated at his pattern-cutting table on Tuesday. There’s a certain grim poetry in that: the notion of a fitting end for a man whose razor-sharp tailoring was a key element in his transformatively glamorous ethos. A case can be made for Price being the first fashion designer that an entire generation of baby glam rockers in the early ‘70s was ever aware of as they osmosed every detail of Roxy Music’s debut album. Price’s clothing credit on the cover was surely a first for the music…

VIENNA — Helmut Lang was never a man of many words. You’ll understand why if you have the good fortune to visit “Séance de Travail 1986–2005,” the retrospective of his career in fashion — the first of its kind anywhere — which just opened at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts in his hometown Vienna.There is so much that does Lang’s talking for him, all of it drawn from the “living archive” he donated to MAK in 2011 after a fire in his studio incinerated everything else. The museum’s inventory runs to more than 10,000 items: design drafts, advertising proofs,…

“Wonderland,” the exhibition that opens at the MOP Foundation in A Coruña in Spain this week is not the biggest show Annie Leibovitz has ever done — it only seems that way, so vast and all-encompassing is it. She describes herself as a passionate bookmaker, and she loves putting together shows to accompany her publications, so it’s probably fitting that her biggest exhibition was also attached to her biggest and most personal book, 2017’s “A Photographer’s Life.” That show travelled all over the world. She eventually had to stop it, because she was worried it was beginning to feel outdated.“Wonderland”…

A Sunday morning in early June. Raf Simons, co-creative director of Prada, is in Milan. Pieter Mulier, creative director of Alaïa, is in Antwerp. I’m in London. We can see each other. We’re going to talk about Belgium, which, I realise now, has insinuated itself into my life in ways I’d never truly registered: through the sounds of New Beat and R&S Records; through the art of Ensor, Borremans and Spilliaert; through the films of the Dardenne Brothers, and the stupendous doc by Johan Grimonprez “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” and, through decades of the clothes on my back, a…