Jilles Dufour gave a sassy, irreverent start to the Paris Ready-to-Wear shows yesterday with his sparky collection for Balmain. Balmain is one of a core of French houses which showed its de luxe haute couture collection last month.
If Balmain Haute Couture, designed by Oscar De La Renta, stands for serious grown-up dressing, then the Dufour R.T.W. line is about youthful exuberance. In his third collection for the house, he pulled out some of the mainstays of couture and jazzed them up in a funky way. Furs were coloured peach and emerald, dinner suits were slipped over graffiti-printed T-shirts and a black velvet cocktail dress was teamed with brightly coloured tights and patent ankle boots.
The raw edges of double-faced wool tweed were fused to prevent fraying and slipped over co-ordinating - never matching - trousers and pretty Scottish intarsia-motif cashmeres.
Balmain opened the Paris R.T.W. collections, which continued last night with the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto and today with Yves St Laurent, where all eyes will be on the Gucci designer Tom Ford, who is now also the new creative director at St Laurent.
Gucci's acquisition of St Laurent is one of a number of recent takeovers that are bringing about a creeping change in the industry, as small family businesses seek financial investment from luxury brand groups to develop a global business.
This was why Jil Sander joined the Prada group and why the Fendi sisters agreed to an LVMH and Prada partnership in their company. The latest to join the big league is the small Italian print house, Pucci, whose idiosyncratic psychedelic prints, created by the house founder Emilio Pucci in the 1960s, proved such an influence this season in Milan.
Last week they agreed to sell two-thirds of their business to LVMH, and there is now speculation that the young Paris-based American designer, Jeremy Scott, is being courted for the design job.