Generalizing about Paris is easy: The waiters are passive-aggressive, the Metro smells, the city is beautiful, and the cheese is to the rest of the world what couture is to Primark. But Paris is strange right now, bittersweet—Lord knows how much all the security checks are going to slow down the womenswear shows. And who cares? Let them be late, but let them be safe.
Generalizing about Paris’s menswear shows, though, is hard—beyond saying that this season’s see-it-everywhere garment was the duffle coat. Odd, that. Sweeping statements that try and unify such a diverse schedule of collections generally come undone after the softest gust of scrutiny. But there was something else. Something even more-everywhere than Paddington Bear’s favorite outerwear. That thing? Rhetoric. Right now, zooming down the line from Paris to London on the Eurostar train, feels like a high-speed extraction from a rhetoric wormhole. So many designers—especially in Paris—like to ascribe their collections with message, with meaning.
Yet only very rarely are clothes as eloquent as the designers who present them. Their chosen medium, cloth, just isn’t capable of articulating what their authors intend. And as Paris recedes, that rhetoric fades. What sticks with you are the clothes and the shows.
There were some moments when the clothes merited the themes sewn into them (rather than patched onto them). At Louis Vuitton there was much to love, theme or no theme. The “Volez Voguez Voyagez” (translation: “Fly Sail Travel”) silk pajama suit, based on a 1965 LV ad campaign, was a marvelous thing that should be required wearing for all Vogue staffers—male or female—next winter. And Kim Jones’s overcoats, with their powerful lines of luxury drawn in fur belt and collar on wool, were masterful reconciliations between opulence and restraint. But could you see, as Jones hoped, Paris’s past and future enmeshed within these clothes? If you squinted a little, yes.
Raf Simons was his own message this season. In a way the collection was irrelevant. For following his finale at Jil Sander (ah, Mazzy Star!) and his debut for Dior (heavy petal), this completed a triptych of significance-laden mark shows—punctuation marks—in the recent narrative of his career. Rumors about his next move are rampant, but for now at least Raf is unchained. And we flocked to see him run wild.
The collection was held in a plywood labyrinth around which strode protagonists cloaked in costumes of dark Americana touched by the pagan, textured by decomposition, and chilled by a zombie coldness. The key pieces were over-oversized, so much so that a fervent Simons-iste declared on the sidewalk afterward: “I loved it all—that was a fashion show! It’s just a pity I couldn’t ever wear any of it myself.” Hmm. Although on Simons’s own website he declares: “I don’t want to show clothes, I want to show my attitude.” So mission accomplished.
Despite Simons’s manifesto, the very greatest collections spark the imagination and fire the cattails not because of the backstory, but because of the clothes. Dries Van Noten’s night at the Palais Garnier needed no explanation: It was a perfect experience in and of itself—a moonlight kiss with your beloved as fireworks explode above and a bellboy hands you a telegram saying that you’ve inherited an estate in Capri. But the clothes would have been almost as marvelous to watch—not just as symptoms of thought, but as products of it—in a featureless white cube with no soundtrack but for the phone alerts of its audience.
Many designers tried to negotiate themes of grief and fear and hopes for peace—very relevant in this city right now. Of all of them, Comme des Garçons and Mihara Yasuhiro tugged most convincingly (and movingly) at its skirts.
Several debutants to the Paris schedule stood out, for different reasons. At Helbers—the first under-his-own-name collection by former Louis Vuitton menswear director Paul Helbers—there was a great mix of ingenious hybrid superlight luxury outerwear and built-for-speed stripped-back tailoring. The only bum note was a release that cited “TS Elliot” as a key influence. Dare I use a spellcheck?
At the other end of the spectrum was the Paris debut of Parsons grad Ximon Lee. The address on the invitation was wrong and the scheduled time to see it was wrong, both of which added resonance to a collection titled “Nightmare.” It wasn’t that bad, though, an aggressively experimental mix of media including silicone panels through which the clothing protruded and was submerged, and hand-painting. And more over-oversized than Simons’s.
Palm Angels might become a thing. Its first presentation was held on a golden stairway staffed by 12 white-clad lads—geddit?—and was pre-empted by a depressing montage of hurricanes and heavy maintenance of public order. The clothes sought salvation via a carefully observed homage to Bob Marley and L.A. skaters as seen through the mind’s eye of photographer-turned-designer Francesco Ragazzi. High-hemmed cavalry flashed jumbo cords, patch camouflage parkas, black-on-brown leopard-print coats, and Marley tracksuits in candy colors will reverse neither the greenhouse effect nor police brutality. But they should find an audience.
The strongest message for this critic this season is that designers should provide just the lightest touch upon the tiller of interpretation rather than insisting on steering that ship themselves. Tell us the facts, not the fictions. And be confident enough to let the shows and the clothes be the story. Whatever the designer says of them should act as background—and never the other way ’round. Although who can’t love Olivier Rousteing for proclaiming: “Paris is the City Of Light. And it is my job to bring back that light.” Such blithely ballsy sincerity is a great thing: Shine on, Olivier.
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