Paris in the springtime: Mouret shows shoe collection

THE DIOR show in Paris yesterday reprised many of the house’s signature styles and colours in an updated way to leave the fashion world guessing as to whether there will be any new appointment to the role of creative director.

Bill Gaytten, who took over from Galliano last year as an interim, produced a romantic collection of ballerina dresses and trim suits and, with Dior buoyed by double-digit profits, now may not be the time for change.

Elsewhere, the Paris-based US designer Rick Owens, whose washed-out leather cardigan- style jackets have become his most famous trademark, sent out a sombre but intriguing collection on masked models.

These long, almost funereal robes in textured wools, mostly grey, had their own dark elegance set against an inferno of leaping flames and deafening techno music.

His usual palette is a dark and neutral one in keeping with a rock-’n’-roll sensibility, but this time it was softened with pale colours such as pink or apricot for tight-fitting shearling jackets worn with long, billowing skirts.

Coats were maxi and mannish, dresses long and figured and there was a new, more blown-out look to some of the leather jackets.

Roland Mouret, he of the Galaxy dress, who was recently appointed creative director of the footwear company Robert Clergerie, unveiled his first shoes, six styles in all, along with his autumn-winter catwalk show in the grand hall of the Westin Hotel yesterday.

Inspired by the idea of protective clothing and the freezing 1947 winter in Paris, detailing, draping and angled cutting were to the fore. A-line skirted suits, some with sexy horizontal seams under the derrière, had apron fronts, patch pockets or tiny bolero tops. As for the shoes, they were modern, blocky and colourful with a forward thrust, like his ambitious expansion plans.

One designer well known for beautiful blouses in the sheerest of chiffon and well-cut trousers is Anne Valérie Hash, who celebrated a decade as a designer with a show in the gilded surroundings of the Shangri La Hotel.

But the flou was tempered with variations on the tuxedo for a look of nonchalant urban chic that was very French.