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, patron saint of voyeurism, very close.
Film and fashion are, of course, both voyeuristic pursuits, which Michele acknowledged with his presentation via the peepshow format of the “kaiserpanorama,” a 19th-century, pre-cinema stereoscopic carousel that created the illusion of movement. Back then, each new sequence would be introduced by the ring of a bell. A small bell was provided with our invitations, but it was superfluous during the actual presentation. To signal transitions, Michele opted instead for gusts of the symphonic techno he loves. They were a grand counterpoint to the imperial majesty of many of the looks. There were also delicate musical moments like the Flower Duet from Delibes’ “Lakme,” which conveyed a rather less furious decadence.
Because decadent this truly was, an all-encompassing epic that magisterially slowed time. Deliberate, on Michele’s part. “People have no patience now,” he says, convinced that social media’s wilful multiplication of imagery has destroyed the concentration that the work of haute couture, for example, demands. So he presented a grand sequence of stand-alone outfits, almost a suspended tableau vivant of one-off couture moments. “As a fashion designer, I can take time to look at one thing for a long time,” Michele added. He wanted us to do the same thing.
“Most of the looks come from a crazy Hollywood fantasy, but it’s not about copying,” he said. True, the feathered showgirl fantasias could have stepped straight out of “Ziegfeld Girl,” the movie that Valentino was so enamoured of during his childhood in Voghera. But amidst all the sculpted columns, there were also Queens of Outer Space with extra-terrestrial coronas, and peignoir-ed princesses from art deco boudoirs, and a Theda Bara vamp with a jewelled skullcap. One of the most gorgeous confections was conjured up from a vintage Erté illustration, a black velvet sheath embroidered and handpainted with pale pink flowers. But for all the torrents of lamé pleating and waterfalls of sequins, the collection wasn’t all about excess. There were moments of control: some exquisitely tailored ’40s suits, a Valentino red gown that might have graced someone like Faye Dunaway in the ’80s or a Pierrot-influenced look that would have fit right in with Valentino’s 40th birthday party at Studio 54 in 1978. Michele himself thought that look had a flavour of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.”
“I feel Jurassic sometimes,” he conceded, in a typically idiosyncratic admission, but he also said, “There’s always a time when you look back at things to start something that will make the present relevant.” In this case, it’s Michele’s passionate belief in the restorative power of beauty that is his vehicle. “It’s like taking mushrooms, because outside is so bad, so concentrated on war, death, on terrible things that sometimes we are not capable to dream any more.” After Matthieu Blazy’s show the other day, is this the Dawning of the Age of Couture Mycellium?
Reflecting on his achievement, Michele said, “Beauty can be scary in a way.” His words sent me spinning back to a conversation with Daniel Roseberry after his Schiaparelli show on Monday. There were creatures on his catwalk that he called “infantas terribles,” akin to the aliens that Ellen Ripley battled. One model even had a shaved head à la Sigourney. The vibrating tail that coiled from her waist suggested full hybrid. Other models had jutting protruberances of horn and bone, like something from an old McQueen show. “I was thinking about the kind of fashion I grew up with watching ‘Fashion File’ in Plano, Texas, and that’s the kind of fashion I’d want my nine-year-old self to see now.”
The no-holds-barred of haute couture was the perfect playground to realise such a dream. Last season, Roseberry talked about resetting Schiaparelli’s rigorous mould. This season, he started with a silhouette he called “turbo-charged,” with a pendulum swing in the opposite direction. “I used to write the review I wanted and then work back from that, but this was about focusing on the feeling while making it.” More internal, in other words, more explorative, more extreme. It showed in the techniques.
“Yes, this was the most technical collection,” Roseberry agreed. “That one blue dress had 65,000 bouquets of handpainted silk threads.” But they were matched by the oscillating 3D lace, the seductive sfumato effects, with nudes toning to black at the waist of black velvet trousers (or tangerine glowing in shadow), the huge vibrating peacock’s tail of a dress, or a bird’s wing framing a model’s face like an extension of her spine. There was the signature Schiap surrealism here but it had erupted into something fierce. (Kudos to the show invitation: a brass bird’s wing suspended from a serpent’s head. It haunts me still.)
Roseberry staged his show in a more immersive setting than the Petit Palais’s usual. It was dark, there was a ring of footlights, like the corridor lighting of the Nostromos in “Alien,” but also, he insisted, like a ballet. Maybe even a danse macabre. In his show notes (he has a future as a writer if the fashion thing ever falls through), he wrote about the epiphany he had during a visit to the Sistine Chapel with the explosive sensuality of Michelangelo’s ceiling in counterpoint to the rigour of the paintings on the walls. Like his peers this week, Roseberry was feeling the agony of the real world. He quoted the Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte: “Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals.” He chose to project his own anger as giving him “permission to experience and create something that was joyful in the process.” Bravo!
