PARIS — Wednesday night in Paris was a clash of the new titans. Haider Ackermann had his third show for Tom Ford, Pieter Mulier had his last for Alaïa. Ackermann left his audience momentarily stunned after a tightly choreographed presentation that was all but an art piece performed in a blisteringly white set. Mulier had his crowd on its feet stomping, cheering in a long goodbye for the designer who is moving to Versace after five years during which he artfully mastered one of the most challenging legacies in the industry.
Ackermann has that same challenge, but he had the edge on Wednesday, mostly because he is in a position where he still has something to prove, whereas Mulier sensibly acknowledged, “I don’t want to do something huge and creative because it’s not the moment you do that. When you leave the house, you keep it calm, you go back to the roots. Basically, that’s it, in a very humble way.” As one sage in the crowd observed, “It’s like leaving the keys on the counter for the new owners when you sell your house.”
“Going back to the roots” for Mulier was basically a reminder of all the reasons why he was able to make Alaïa his own over the past five years. His vocabulary included T-shirt dresses that were masterclasses in subtle seaming; sinuously tailored coat dresses; swing coats in pony; poloneck dresses cut high on the thigh. The tactility of velvet was an Azzedine staple. Mulier made an irresistible pant suit in deepest burgundy. He wrapped Gemma Ward in gold velvet, left the straps off a stark, lush black column, closed the show with a jolt of burnt orange. Azzedine also got his fix from croc, and Mulier acknowledged the master with a little shift dress, or inserted croc panels in the gowns worn by his neo-supes Lulu and Vittoria. Models wearing the house’s full-skirted shearlings had their heads wrapped as they would once have been shown.
If this is making it sound like it was Mulier’s reverence for the past that made him such a master at Alaïa, that’s not the case. After the show, he spoke about what he’d learned in his years there. “Precision, editing … and I learned that real luxury is not what we all think. It’s the perfectly cut jacket.” Reduction to the essence. Repetition. Didn’t we hear the same thing at Saint Laurent the other night? Mulier had his favourite composer Gustavo Rudman reduce five years of soundtracks to one uplifting musical surge. Repetition.
“Azzedine did one skirt 50 times, and the last one was the best one,” Mulier said. “The collection is a bit that also. It’s trying to be perfect, even though perfection doesn’t exist. Still, it made my heart beat.” Now he’s off to Africa for a break, and next, Versace. Or, as he said succinctly, “The opposite.”
Speaking of beating hearts, be still mine, after Haider Ackermann’s show for Tom Ford on Wednesday. He saw his woman and man as longterm survivors of debauch who had found a vital inner steel that kept them standing straight after a life of excess. But this was also his own response to the complexity and violence of the world that fashion is struggling to place itself in. The key, he insisted, was balance. The soundtrack played “Sweet Harmony,” one of the Second Summer of Love’s most plangent anthems. But transparency was important too. There was plenty of plastic in Ackermann’s collection, and under it, you could see the layers of a person’s life, the shirttails, the underwear, maybe the perversity too.
Ackermann said he loved the word “rigour.” It definitely applied to his collection with its strictness and formality. “It’s needed,” he insisted, “otherwise there are no rules. And we’re living in a world without rules nowadays. We need a little bit of discipline.” Ackermann’s answer in fashion terms was the acuteness of his tailoring for men and women, the razor-sharp cashmere suiting with accompanying collar and tie (though the collar might be perforated leather). “Still ‘American Psycho,’” he admitted. “Still the killer. I can’t get rid of him.”
The casting of his show was spectacular, truly a range of characters that ran a Fordian gamut from desiccated decadence to gilded innocence. The clothes dressed them accordingly. It was a surprise to learn that Ackermann grew up with an activist father who was deeply involved with UNICEF and Amnesty International. “Humanity is a big word in my upbringing,” he said. Which meant that the question he was asking himself daily was, “How do you rationalise that with what you do?” His answer was “the need for beauty.”
And beauty resounded in Ackermann’s show on Wednesday. It may not have been to everyone’s tastes but its power, conviction and diversity were indisputable. The sweetest harmony, indeed.
Wednesday began with a show that celebrated Nicolas Di Felice’s fifth anniversary at Courrèges. No, it actually began with the ticktocking of an alarm clock while his audience took their seats in a set design that was as deliberately narrow as a Metro carriage. Tension mounted, spurred on by that increasingly infernal ticktock. Temporary chaos ensued, just like a normal rush hour.
It was all part of Nico’s effort to record a day in the life of the Courrèges woman. The alarm clock eventually went off, the audience was treated to the musique concrete of her finding her way out of bed and off to work. But it wasn’t tension he wanted to evoke. He prepared for the season by watching the films of Chantal Akermann, a name you may not know but whose “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” was selected best film of all time in 2022 in a critics’ poll which is taken every decade by film bible “Sight and Sound” magazine. Di Felice described her films as “meditative, slow, the real speed of life.” A day in that kind of life offered him the chance to show a wide range of clothes, an entire wardrobe even, right down to a skirt and gown wittily made up of yellow Metro tickets. “In my career, I try to conceptualise too much,” he said after his show. “I’ve never really stopped to do the garments I was known for in the beginning. In this collection, I wanted to show the kind of cut that I do, the kind of silhouette that I try to propose to people. I love to cut clothes. Every detail is important. That’s the essence of the Courrèges look.”
The stiffened tabard fronts and collars, the reinforced waists now felt like defensive gestures in an uncertain world, but Di Felice insisted that he wasn’t making statements. On his moodboard were archival photos of Andre Courrèges looks that he had duplicated on his own runway — the barely-there bikini strip, the transparent polo with modesty-preserving pockets. “It’s an amazing archive,” he claimed. “I can’t always work with the same little trapeze dress.” But his powerful all-white finale (even the metro tickets were bleached) was his personal response to the current state of fashion where, as he said “every house is relaunching and screaming its values.” Andre Courrèges loved white. It was all he wore. For him it meant light and purity. Di Felice had a bigger picture in mind. To that list, he added peace.
