LEAVE IT TO LANVIN
It was a fall season of hard-edged tailoring and soft ruffles, armor-like details and feminine lace, extreme craft and sleek futurism. It was a fall season that was all over the place.
But at Lanvin, Alber Elbaz pulled it all together into one beautiful package, tied up with yards and yards of grosgrain ribbon. He gave us the power woman we had been waiting for through a month of shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris. These weren’t the samurai warrior princesses of Nicolas Ghesquiere’s science fiction imagination at Balenciaga, or the scary fembots of Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurent. They weren’t Olivier Theyskens’ woodland nymphs at Nina Ricci or the spandex-clad super athletes Miuccia Prada introduced at Miu Miu.
These were Everywoman, real-life femme fatales emerging from the fog ready to take on the world in the boardroom, the bedroom, on the red carpet and in the carpool lane. Elbaz doesn’t make fantasy collections. His clothes are not so tied to a trend or season that you won’t want to look at them after four months, and they aren’t designed for 17-year-old bodies. Which in this economy means they make sense.
This was minimalism Lanvin-style, a nearly all-black, seasonless collection that was about romance and painstaking technique more than rigid tailoring, covered up yet easily dressed up with Gobstopper-sized crystal necklaces and bracelets.
Grosgrain ribbon has become a Lanvin signature. After all, it was those ribbon-wrapped pearls and ribbon-strung pendants that helped put the house back in the fashion spotlight, sparking interest in the costume jewelry business among other designers who have made statement necklaces a trend for fall.
This time, ribbon was at the heart of the collection, with sewn-together strips of grosgrain and chiffon wrapping the body to create softly draped shirts, short skirts gathered into a single frill at the hip, and the most elegant long-sleeve black dress you’ve ever seen, with rippling ribbons down the front.
An oversized bow became a bustier suspended from nude spaghetti straps, and a soft black silk blazer had the ease of a robe. Ribbons morphed into sparkly gold-sequined strands on a dress with black illusion sleeves, worn with ropes of pearl necklaces strung through a ribbon belt in a neat styling trick to keep them in place. It was just the note on which to end the season.
Historical romance
Alexander McQueen is a better showman than almost any other designer, but there’s always been something intimidating about his work. Maybe it was the season he put live wolves on the runway. Or the time he drew inspiration from witches burned at the stake.
This season, he moved beyond all that with a collection that stood next to Lanvin and Balenciaga as the week’s most brilliant. Set on a runway wrapped in white cloth in the spirit of the artist Christo, it was a monarchy-meets-maharajah opus on the British Empire, but as always, with an edge.
McQueen’s tailoring skills were on display on an amazing hourglass shaped jacket with slightly padded hips in black leather with the look of brocade, worn with skinny motorcycle pants. Meanwhile, a red tartan suit with ruffled seams veered toward punk. Sweetly romantic, 1950s-era dance dresses were molded to the body on one side and puffed up with crinolines on the other. One came in gray mohair covered in snowflake embroidery, another with a black lace overlay in the shape of two peacocks. There was even a dress in a Queen Elizabeth portrait print, with crystals outlining her jewels. This collection looked like couture, and you can bet some of it will make its way onto a red carpet now that McQueen is opening a store on Melrose Avenue in May.
At Nina Ricci, Olivier Theyskens took a walk in enchanted woods, working in a lovely palette of dusty lavender and pink, raisin, peach and saffron, with daubed prints recalling specks of sunlight, and the wings of moths. Theyskens understands better than anyone that this is not the age of polished perfection, and one couldn’t help but see a bit of the Olsen twins in the models’ draped, languid layers and mussed tresses. Which of course means that the twisting, liquidy silk, slim trousers poured into the tops of boots and worn with wispy chiffon print blouses aren’t for everyone.
Far more compelling were some of the season’s most marvelous tailcoats, softly draped with wide, sloping shoulders, one in brown leather cut into a soft petal shape in the back; another in lavender with a liquid silver velvet lining.
For his own label, John Galliano went to the Xanadu of “Kubla Khan” and Samuel Coleridge with a Hollywood-worthy production involving golden gods, palm trees, fish ponds and luxuriating lads in turbans. The show started as a costume drama of 1920s Orientalist zouave pants, headpieces and shawl collared coats. (What was it with ridiculous pants on the runway this season?) Then he moved into more familiar territory, the 1940s, showing the wispy, flutter-sleeved chiffon gowns he’s known for, as pretty now as they ever were, but nothing new creatively.
Then there was Marc Jacobs, who’s firmly in the tailoring camp for fall at Louis Vuitton. Where fashion inspiration is concerned, architecture is the new art, and the painterly prints of spring gave way to an emphasis on cutting and silhouette, the interplay between curves and geometric planes.
This was a more exaggerated version of what Jacobs did with his own label in New York, and if you could look past the unflattering dirndl skirts and cartoonish peg leg trousers, there were some interesting pieces, including the sculpted peplum jackets that have emerged as must haves for fall, one with a silver cage attached to drive home the point that this was a collection about construction.
Even the hair was tailored into slick, sculptural ‘dos, and topped with cylindrical hats that recalled Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim. The bags were understated as they have been everywhere, with embossed leather logos and not a hint of the artistic fetishizing that brought Jacobs and Takashi Murakami together, and to L.A. last year for a museum exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary.
But the jewelry was statement making, with oversized scrap heap necklaces and brooches recalling our very own Frank Gehry. Maybe it was all that time hanging downtown, near Disney Hall.
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