Paris in a Festive Mood With the Arrival of Spring Couture
This city was a fashion festival this week--from the inauguration of the $6.9-million Museum of Fashion in the Louvre to the dedication of city sidewalk plaques honoring past couture greats Madeleine Vionnet and Paul Poiret, to the opening of the 1986 spring/summer couture collections.
The museum was launched officially on Tuesday by French President Francois Mitterrand. Its first exhibit features a series of fashion vignettes, including one Belle Epoque mannequin stretched naked on a lace-hung bed with heaps of frilly underthings flung around her. Other exhibits include display cases of all-white, bias-cut dresses by Vionnet and glamorous long, black originals by Coco Chanel.
While costume exhibits often seem lifeless, this one has a wit and energy level that, sadly, was missing from some of the couture runways this week.
Perhaps the highest energy came from Chanel, beginning with the white suit that opened the collection and on through to the white bridal dress that closed it. Now in his fourth year as the firm’s couture designer, Karl Lagerfeld manages each season to make the classic Chanel vocabulary totally current.
He has cut Chanel suit jackets so close to the body this season that the fabric looks almost carved on the models. These sleek, spare jackets are then skinnied over narrow, knee-clearing skirts and topped with boater hats featuring ribbons and gardenias. The look is Chanel, but younger than it has been in a long time.
Lagerfeld also shows slim, draped dresses, a sensational navy wool coat and a group of black crepe cocktail suits with flirty peplums.
Among the evening standouts was a cyclamen, strapless, taffeta ballerina dress under a floating coat and a narrow, black crepe-linen, strapless dress with draped, floating panels.
Lagerfeld has a lot of fun with accessories: gold metal Chanel handbags are scaled down to earring size and swing on chains from the earlobe; miniature “bottles” of Coco perfume also turn into earrings, and charm bracelets feature the classic Chanel sling-back shoe, the handbag and a medallion of Mademoiselle Chanel.
“This collection alone was worth the trip across the Atlantic,” said Sonia Caproni, vice president and fashion director of I. Magnin, who, after an absence of several years, has been coming back to the couture for the past three seasons.
“The couture gives us such a good idea of what is to come in ready-to-wear. It’s good for us to see it now, because when we come back in March to buy, we have a clear idea of what to look for.”
To celebrate the first anniversary of its Chanel boutique in Beverly Hills, the house will present two showings of its spring ready-to-wear collection on Feb. 11 at the Beverly Hills shop on Rodeo Drive.
Also at the collections was Ellin Saltzman, senior vice president and fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue, who commented: “At the couture, you really can see what each designer does best and at its most personal.”
Yves Saint Laurent’s collection was highly personal, with the kind of pared-down purity and simplicity that can look like nothing at all or the ultimate in chic. Fans opted for the latter interpretation.
As everywhere this week, the suit was the important day message again and again.
Through marvels of custom tailoring, Saint Laurent managed to make even the strictest jacket hug every curve. Skirts here were straight but slightly longer than in other shows.
One of the best of the suits was the black gabardine edge-to-edge jacket teamed with a white Shantung vest and a belted blouse worn out over the slim skirt.
Perhaps as homage to the Balenciaga retrospective in Lyons this summer, Saint Laurent included a larger-than-usual group of day dresses, most with hip draping and cap sleeves.
For evening, he skinnied satin or crepe into body-revealing sheaths, the most dramatic with midriff and back cutouts.
Color, one of Saint Laurent’s genius talents, was more subdued than usual, with day clothes in shades of gray, taupe and navy. For evening: cafe au lait, navy and black with an occasional, pretty burst of pink or yellow.
Color was definitely one of the strong messages at Emmanuel Ungaro. Turquoise, yellow, apricot or almond were for his solid-color, sleek peplum suits or were mixed in prints or solid blocks in a single outfit. Here, as elsewhere, a very strong endorsement for the ladylike, pure white suit, definitely meant for the woman whose major work is attending board meetings.
Draping is Ungaro’s signature, and for spring, he even drapes the yokes, front and back, of easy flowing trousers.
“I don’t change every season,” Ungaro says. “I like to continue with an idea and develop it.” The idea he developed this season was what he calls “rolled draping”--dresses in which the front is a masterwork of pleated draping while the back falls in a loose bubble of fabric. The standout was a floor-length version in pink crepe.
A star accessory of this season is the hat, and Ungaro’s are among the most dramatic around: cartwheels of black opaque fabric that all but hid the models from view.
At Jean Patou, the hats were even more dramatic--many looking like upturned straw garden seats filled to overflowing with masses of flowers. The hats topped some of the wittiest and most inventive clothes of the week, designed by a relative newcomer to the couture, Christian Lacroix.
Two of his best ideas were the strapless ball gowns with huge skirts, hand painted in exotic motifs. The skirts snapped off to reveal flirtatious, short, beaded evening sheaths.
As done by Lacroix, this was the couture of the glory days of the 1950s, when no idea was too extravagant to give it a go.
At Dior, Marc Bohan concentrated on one idea--and when it worked, it was great. His idea: the polo shirt. He uses this basic shape for the top of little gabardine dresses, as the silk blouse shape under his short, jacketed suits and in beaded form for evening, as tops for full-skirted taffeta ball gowns. While most lengths here were short, Bohan did include a few mid-calf-length, pleated silk dresses.
Givenchy was another fan of short lengths for daytime, sticking to above-the knee hemlines even for his always-sensational coats. He believes in to-the-floor lengths for evening, where his dramatic embroideries were inspired.
