A fitting McQueen memoriam in Paris
It was a rare moment of quiet during a whirlwind month of women’s fashion shows, when models slowly paraded out into a gilded salon wearing the final 15 masterpieces by the late Lee Alexander McQueen.
Each look had been hand-cut on a dress form by the British designer, who committed suicide last month, and each one was more breathtaking than the next. The pieces were so full of religious iconography, including angels and virgins, that one imagines McQueen was contemplating his own mortality while he was creating them.
Inspired by Byzantine art, the carvings of Grinling Gibbons and Old Masters such as Botticelli and Hieronymus Bosch, each piece in the Tuesday show was designed to be a runway showstopper.
In some cases entire works of art, in others just small details were captured digitally, woven into jacquards or engineered to fit individual garments.
A red satin dress with an organ-pleated skirt had intricate gold embroidery, bringing to mind the ironwork on a rood screen in a church. Another dress, in a vintage gold brocade, was worn with a bib necklace and cuff bracelets made of stained glass.
Gilded heels were hand-sculpted into tangles of ivy, acorns and skulls, or jewel-encrusted angel carvings -- the kind of details that would have been lost in the circus-like setting of a typical McQueen runway show.
A draped and folded jacket and straight-leg trousers were digitally printed with what looked to be a Renaissance oil painting depicting angels. A column gown, softly draped in back, turned the model into a living temple, with the image of two hands reaching toward each other over the heart.
On another gown, two female figures, virgins perhaps, were printed on either side of the bodice. The pleats of their robes became one with the pleats of the gown.
But the final look was the most eerie, a gilded feather shroud with an embroidered white tulle skirt peeking out from underneath.
It’s hard to imagine how so much beauty came from so much pain. Hopefully somehow, somewhere, McQueen has finally found peace.
There was a certain solemn ceremony to Monday’s Yves Saint Laurent show too, but for the wrong reason. Designer Stefano Pilati had the right instinct to clean up and pare down, with a collection in nearly all black and white. But the sum total of the black capelets, crisp white shirts with clerical-looking collars and floppy black hats that hugged the face almost like veils made me wonder if Pilati had watched too many reruns of “The Flying Nun.” (Do they even rerun “The Flying Nun?”)
No doubt he was thinking about ease of dressing and creating a uniform for a woman’s life. But the styling was a distraction, particularly long chain necklaces strung not with crosses but with chicly dressed female figures. (Pilati’s icons, perhaps?)
Where was the sex appeal and where was the joy? His take on the sisters of perpetual mercy neglected that part of the equation entirely, as if repentance was all there is.
A different vision of the divine was apparent in Marc Jacobs’ Louis Vuitton collection, “And God Created Woman.” Set around a romantic fountain near the Louvre, the show’s starting point on Wednesday was Vuitton’s streamlined Speedy bag -- a duffel shape created in 1930 “to meet the demands of a new era of ever-accelerating travel,” according to the show notes.
Jacobs flattened the iconic style, covered it in sequins and lace, and stretched it “from East to West.” The result was a range of elegant, structured bags worn with retro-ladylike clothes that seemed to pay homage to the feminine and the heyday of haute couture.
It was a story that Jacobs started telling three weeks ago in New York at his namesake show, which was also sweetly nostalgic. Here, he mined the past again, with 1950s fit-and-flare dresses or pleated skirts topped with pinstripe wool corsets, hourglass-shaped jackets with crystal buttons or girlish sweaters.
It was a way of saying that today, true luxury is not always looking for the fastest and newest. It’s taking the time to enjoy quality and craftsmanship.
In the last few weeks, we’ve seen evidence of a new slow fashion movement at Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel and Celine. Even as designers beamed their shows instantly around the world over the Internet, they were reverent to the timelessness of their brands, using artistry and quality to define a new, more restrained era in luxury fashion.
Ironically, McQueen will always be remembered as a showman for having some of the most dynamic, fast-paced runway shows in the fashion business. But in the end, it was he more than any other designer this season who reminded us to stop and smell the roses.
