Fashion Flip-Flop Marks Move Away From Androgynous Look
Booties from the Seven Dwarfs. Sunglasses from the Blues Brothers. Chair-shaped pillboxes from the Mad Hatter. Babushkas from Dostoevski. And psychedelic wigs from Little Orphan Annie.
These sight-gag accessories for fall provide the comic relief for some of the most sober, sensible, serious-minded clothes ever to hit the stage of Paris fashion.
Take, for example, the daytime suit. After seasons of oversize jackets with inflated shoulders, the fitted suit returns to fashion. You’ll see it in gray flannel, tweed, plaid, checks and covert cloth, and you’ll know it by the way it fits--snugged to perfection at Hubert de Givenchy, carved to the body at Azzedine Alaia, tailored to a T at Nino Cerruti, smoothed to the hips at Yves Saint Laurent and zipped to curve at Valentino.
This preoccupation with fit could be considered a logical follow-up to the shapeless layered looks from the Japanese. It might also be a natural consequence of “the return of haute couture “--that much-heralded event made possible here by the continual flow of petrodollars from the oil-rich Middle East. (It is a proven fact of fashion life that women who spend the $4,000 minimum required for couture clothes want those designs to show off the figures they work so hard to maintain.)
In many ways, the perfect little patrician suit, the little-nothing jersey dress and the plain little mink jacket with the proper little Hermes scarf have more than little in common. Each is distinctly female. Even the jackets have darts to control the curves. And some, like those by Jean Paul Gaultier, have drapery-like folds under each bosom just so people will know they are for girls, not boys.
With even Boy George now sporting a boy haircut, fashion androgyny seems to have left the cutting edge of style and is in the midst of being replaced by all sorts of disparate elements.
Take hair, for example. There is short, close-to-the-head hair. And there is long, full, back-combed hair. Nothing in between. There are round, orange Little Orphan Annie wigs at Thierry Mugler. And there are Wagnerian braids at Gaultier. The big story in hairpieces is that they are used as accessories, never in colors to match the real hair.
Contradictions abound. Gray flannel, for example, turns up as a ball gown at Chanel. Rugs become skirts and boleros at Gaultier. Chairs become hats and fabric prints at Karl Lagerfeld. Mink jackets are turned inside out and upside down at Alaia. Sunglasses reverse at Claude Montana, short sweaters are worn on top of longer jackets at both Montana and Gaultier, and quilted satin leaves the boudoir for both the streets (Montana’s quilted satin-lapeled and satin-cuffed coats) and the nightclub (Sonia Rykiel’s quilted satin pants and Valentino’s quilted satin “pantskirts”).
Hemlines too are often up and down--even in the same collection. Saint Laurent, Mugler and Rykiel all show real, thigh-high minis. Saint Laurent, Mugler and Rykiel also all show real mid-calf lengths, and Rykiel even offers some just-above-the-ankle lengths for day that look the most directional of all.
There is more pants news this season than in the past several years. Stirrup ski pants, for example, star in many collections, often in black velvet. Evening pants stage a big comeback. And the honors for the most original pants of the year go to a woman who until this season had never even made a pair of pants--Jacqueline de Ribes. Her gray flannel pants with black velvet high-rise midriff can function day or night. So too can many of the clothes from her new category called informal evenings--satin blouses with their own jeweled cuff links, mohair stoles and coats and silk print cutaway jackets with black velvet collars.
In many ways, De Ribes represents the key to understanding the new French clothes. The vicomtesse not only designs for the Establishment, she is the Establishment. And at this moment of Establishment chic, she is doing more to further its inventive side than some of the most established names in Paris fashion. She is making fashion headlines the old-fashioned way--she’s earning them.
