PARIS -- Fashion isn't so haphazard anymore. It's more polished. A little more dressed up and covered up.
Indeed, when Nicki Minaj turned up at Haider Ackermann's fall 2017 show earlier this month wearing half a bodice and a pastie, few admired the rapper's daring. Dismayed that such a talented performer could so poorly misjudge the setting and the crowd, folks simply shook their heads: What a pity.
Fashion hasn't turned formal and stuffy. It's just the opposite. There remains a love for the avant-garde, for youth culture, for the esoteric and the confounding. Fashion has simply pulled back from baroque gestures and conspicuous awkwardness. There were fewer elaborately painted faces, as well as fewer morning-after ones. The industry is making a pitch for barefaced normalcy.
No matter where designers are seeking inspiration, they seem to have lost their taste for gritty informality. Or for the street. Or for nudity as a form of subversive style. Technique matters. Street style is cleaned up, even at rising young brands such as Koche, which made its name using luxury fabrics to create a down-market look.
In the final show of the fall 2017 season on March 7, Louis Vuitton models descended a magnificent staircase at the Louvre. It was quite an experience to watch models dressed in designer Nicolas Ghesquiere's tribal-looking furs and tailored trousers winding their way through the museum's stone corridors -- dwarfed by the stately sculptures and under the glorious glass of I.M. Pei's pyramid.
The clothes were not grand. Models did not appear in floor-sweeping gowns fit for a royal court. Instead, they wore garments that were effortful. That didn't mean they were contrived; they were not. But they were the kind of clothes that show one cares about how one looks, cares about the setting, cares about the occasion.
This isn't street style, marked by athletic references and nomadic sensibility. Ghesquiere did not produce some glorified version of easy. But these clothes were nonetheless made for urban streets. They'd improve the landscape of downtowns and midtowns.
If there was a counterbalance to the stateliness of the setting for Louis Vuitton, it was the fur-lined palace that hosted the Miu Miu presentation earlier that day. Designer Miuccia Prada had the benches, the pillars, the staircase of her show space upholstered in purple fake fur. The whole place glowed like a Dr. Seuss book come to life.
To a psychedelic hip-hop soundtrack of De La Soul, models strode out in sherbet-colored coats with furry collars, cat-printed knit trousers with matching tops, dazzling shoes, furry hats and boots, and glittering tiaras.
It was kooky. But the proportions were balanced; the color combinations were daring. It was executed with care. There's that word again.
JACKETS ARE BIG
At Balenciaga, designer Demna Gvasalia offered a collection more deeply influenced by the rigors and rules of haute couture. With his Off-White collection, Virgil Abloh was more interested in tailoring and dressmaking than it was luxury hoodies or broken down jeans.
The result, at least for trends, has been an emphasis on jackets: tailored, oversize, asymmetrical, embellished. Celine was a vertigo-inducing show that had the audience seated on bleachers that made a full 360-degree rotation as the models speed-walked around them. But despite feeling vaguely woozy in this whirling world, it was possible to appreciate the cut of designer Phoebe Philo's jackets and to think that, yes, it makes perfect sense to tool around town with a blanket tossed over your arm in case the weather becomes simply too much to bear.
Veronique Branquinho's jackets were cut from men's suiting. She also showed one of the most austere, but dramatic choices for evening: a stark black, long-sleeved ensemble with crystals dotting the waist. At Hermes, designer Nadege Vanhee-Cybulski, produced her most effervescent collection to date, filled with refined color-blocking, trim jackets, bold belts and proportions that felt contemporary and sophisticated.
Samuel Drira's Nehera included classic jackets with their inner workings revealed. Maison Margiela's John Galliano played with cutouts, reducing his varsity jackets -- a nod to Marilyn Monroe's Joe DiMaggio period -- to a basic outline. He also turned handbags into hats. Why not?
The world, after all, has turned upside-down.
High Profile on 03/19/2017