Stella Gets Her Groove Going

On a cold and rainy morning here, a star was born. The strains of the Beatles’ anthem, “All You Need Is Love,” blasted through the gilded halls of the Opera Garnier as the first Chloe collection created by 25-year-old Stella McCartney debuted to a large and appreciative audience--including the designer’s parents, Paul and Linda McCartney, as well as Ringo Starr and his wife, Barbara Bach.

A few xenophobic eyebrows were raised when McCartney was appointed to succeed Karl Lagerfeld at Chloe. (Lagerfeld is German, but anti-English feelings die particularly hard, that nasty business of the Hundred Years’ War, and all.) By now, the French have pretty much accepted that the creative reins of their once local fashion industry have fallen into the hands of an international set of carpetbaggers.

Among the glut of more than 90 spring fashion shows scheduled over a nine-day period here, the most anticipated included John Galliano’s collection for Dior (he was born in Malta and grew up in Britain) and those of Australian Collette Dinnigan and Japanese Rei Kawakubo, who by presenting in Paris inevitably steal some of the limelight from the dwindling corps of home-grown talent.

The Chloe collection was dedicated to McCartney’s mother, who has been battling breast cancer. After the show, the proud parents--she sporting an attractive crew cut--beamed and shouted “Great show,” to the crowd of well-wishers and photographers who clustered around them.

Stella McCartney’s smile was also wide as she took her bow. With her round face and rosy complexion, she looks to be the sort of neurosis-free girl you’d want to have roomed with at boarding school. She studied fashion and had designed a small line under her own name in London, but her youth, inexperience and pedigree made some skeptical about whether she was up to the demands of her new job. (She and Donatella Versace might have commiserated on the curse of meeting high expectations.)

Despite her father’s status as an icon of the ‘60s, that decade was one of the few McCartney ignored in a collection packed with both dramatic flourishes and wearable clothes. She imported a Saville Row tailor as consultant on sharp suits and coats fit for a London dandy. (Maybe they were a touch Carnaby Steet, circa 1968.) Her roots also surfaced in pastel Fair Isle patterns, but the cotton sweaters were cropped and strapless, paired with the season’s new pant, the skinny pedal pusher, which was adorned by McCartney with ruffled edges.

Those ruffles tell a story. The dominant look of last spring and summer was unabashedly feminine, defined by sheer fabrics more customary in the bedroom than in public. Women reveled in lingerie details, even lingerie worn in daylight--especially in Los Angeles, where looking pretty is less a sin against chic than other cities.

McCartney had been a proponent of the slip skirt and lacy camisole in her own collection. She hasn’t abandoned the style, proving that those who adopted it early will continue wearing their old favorites, while more recent converts will find new versions next spring.

Some of the undies on view at Chloe were faggoted white cotton batistes from the Belle Epoque. A pale blue silk bias-cut halter dress featured exquisite lace rimming the top. As delicate as that look was, McCartney took a risk by crossing the line into deliberate tackiness, showing a violent pink slit skirt slashed up to yesterday and screamy blue satin linings on tough black suits.

For the woman whose fantasies run more to “Tom Jones” than “Showgirls,” corsets in Wedgwood stripes and moires topped full-skirted evening gowns that were overtly costume-y while still appealing to the contemporary wench.

Collette Dinnigan could never be accused of imitating the innerwear-as-outerwear style. The fact is she began as a lingerie designer, and in Los Angeles, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue sell her clothes in the dress and lingerie departments. As lovely as the transparent rosebud prints, ruffled camisoles and lace-trimmed slipdresses in her spring collection were, short, shaped coats and tight, straight skirts of flowered brocade were the hits of the show. Now that women have invested in layers of bodysuits, slips and bras beautiful enough to expose under sheer tops, the opaque materials demonstrated a little mystery can be as provocative as the near nakedness designers have been offering.

Well, actually, Laeticia, the miraculously endowed French teen-aged model who has the makings of a new Bardot, was the real star of the Dinnigan show. The photographers, a hardy fraternity of dedicated heterosexuals, seem to especially enjoy their work on a day when Laeticia, who can be seen on the cover of the current American Elle, makes an appearance.

The boudoir, billiard room, ballroom and parlor of a grand French mansion were the setting for John Galliano’s gloriously over-the-top collection for Christian Dior. Like the clothes, the rooms were a fantasy, created in the normally sterile exhibition halls under the Louvre by the designer who best understands the crucial relationship between fashion and theater.

Although the collection was nominally Dior’s ready-to-wear line, if bias-cut mermaid gowns suspended from jeweled straps and a long sheath of burgundy toile de Jouy print, veiled in gold-braided tulle will be produced in multiples and are not too precious to hang on a store rack, we’ll turn in our dangling pearl and ruby hoop earrings and lace-encrusted fan. With clothes this precious, who needs couture?

In fact, the show amplified the Belle Epoque experiments Galliano had whipped up for his fall couture show. Nearly the entire collection was glamorous evening dresses. Lingerie touches abounded at Dior too--in a silk twinset of camisole and short-sleeved sweater and ivory lace-edged boxers revealed through a side-slit skirt.

This year, Dior’s quilted bag joined the lineup of Prada and Chanel knock-offs. The public relations value of Nicole Kidman, who attended the Dior show, wearing a Galliano gown to the last Academy Awards can’t be underestimated.

When broader, more flagrantly padded shoulders appeared for fall, the gnawing suspicion that fashion might be returning to the ‘80s arose. In fact, there have been echoes of that decade in a number of collections shown in Milan and Paris. But the “Dynasty”-New York-masters of the universe-Ivana Trump-’80s aren’t being revisited so much as the perception-altering styles Japanese designers Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto pioneered then.

In Milan, Jil Sander’s intricately cut silhouettes brought those designers to mind. Frayed edges on asymmetrically cut dresses at Alberta Ferretti did too. Ennio Capasa, the Milanese designer for Costume National, who shows in Paris, presented a somber show filled with intricate seaming, diagonal lines and layers of fabric bunching on the body. Origami folds are interesting when done with paper, but odd and difficult to love when applied to clothes.

Comme des Garcons designer Rei Kawakubo is often called an intellectual designer. Watching her pale, zombified models parade under the Gothic arches of the Conciergerie, the former prison where Marie Antoinette was beheaded, it was clear why. For Kawakubo is a designer who forces one to think. Her ivory gowns composed of tissue-fine layers of silk and natural muslin would make wonderful costumes for a Mad Maxian epic. In presenting this post-apocalyptic vision, tortured shapes with unfinished armholes and tattered hems, is she trying to say that the world, as we know it, is over?

The bemused museum-goer who looks at a Jackson Pollack canvas and remarks, “My 5-year-old could do that,” might have the same response to Kawakubo’s complex artistry. Yet her status as an original thinker has become even more obvious as the imitators mine her early work. In Kawakubo’s hands, fashion truly is art. Someone should have told the others, “Don’t try this at home. It isn’t as easy as it looks.”