With the range and number of shows on offer, Paris proves that it retains its fashion pre-eminence
PARIS FASHION week opened yesterday, rounding off the international collections for autumn/winter 2010 with some 90 catwalk presentation on the official calendar alongside trade shows and ancillary events.
Launches include new books on Yves St Laurent and Pierre Cardin and the debut of Turkish Vogue. Effects of social media were widespread with cameras everywhere; I watched one photographer stretched out on the ground in his efforts to capture a pair of dagger stilettos.
Coming in the wake of Milan whose normal seven-day schedule was reduced to four, reflecting the city’s diminishing fashion influence and ongoing financial difficulties, Paris still maintains its pre-eminence as the number one global fashion capital.
It is from these catwalks that new trends and currents spread down to the street, that ideas are absorbed and translated all over the world.
The new mood of sobriety emerging from London, New York and Milan found echoes in the surprising and beautiful collection from Dries Van Noten yesterday. Known for his masterful and individual approach to colour, print and fabric, this collection with its stark modern rigour and dark palate was a sharp contrast to his previous collection and to the grandeur of the surroundings in which it was presented in the Town Hall of Paris.
It was a collection with a refined emphasis on utilitarian elegance with khaki pants and waistcoats worn with blocky shoes and fun-fur scarves. There were terrific collarless coats, capacious yet cool, while a trench belted casually over a full skirt had more than a hint of the 1950s as did many of the dresses with their shirtwaister tops and swishy skirts in camouflage colours. The only decorative touches were silver embellishments embroidered on the sleeves of a blouson or on a slim evening dress. The craftsmanship showed in the detail, in the handpainted blue/black jackets and in cobwebby skirts threaded with tiny beads. A lovely collection.
Making his debut yesterday was a Paris-based UK designer with a very different vision of women. Gareth Pugh’s dark collection of black neoprene tailored like leather into stiff angular warrior jackets and lean leggings was uncompromising in its brutalism, if occasionally repetitive.
But the tailoring was precise and assured and the menswear, in its avant garde way with skirts layered over trousers, had youthful flamboyance.