PARIS (AP) — The importance of sticking to your guns, metaphorically and creatively speaking, was a lesson from a resurgent menswear season in a tourist-packed and superficially booming Paris. As seemingly everywhere, prices in the French capital have skyrocketed. Hotels of all levels are full, and the cost of a takeaway jambon beurre sandwich is nearly double what it was just six months ago.
The challenges for real menswear designers, as opposed to multinational groups using clothing as a loss leader to sell logo bags, include starting a fresh conversation with consumers, reinventing the landscape of work, and utilizing the evolution of the ways we interpret gender as a creative tool.
With regards to the latter, this may be the place to note that despite the prevalence of frilly handbags, tote bags, murses, skirts and other things, some designers have successfully eliminated traditional feminine associations, the menswear this season focused on those who lean towards the masculine. Largely gone from Paris and Milan were dual-gender presentations, or much of the sexual ambiguity that marked pre-pandemic experimentation. Although gender fluidity is here to stay, this was not her time on the Paris catwalks. At least for now, the designers went with the good old, bad old binary: men, of course, are the new men.
That was great for designers like Thom Browne and Hedi Slimane, each of whom waited until the end of three consecutive fashion weeks in Florence, Milan and Paris to stage shows that blew the doors off. In the salons of the Automobile Club de France on the second floor of the Hotel Crillon, Thom Browne’s show was, in a way, an affectionate parody of the stale couture presentations of the “Funny Face” era. Models carried numbered palettes and a group of famous house friends (Marisa Berenson, Farida Khelfa, Amy Fine Collins and others) staggered stereotypically “late” in heels and limp skirts.
They took their seats in the ballroom just in time to ogle a group of guys wearing tweed dresses so short you prayed no one had left like a commando. There were button-down shirts in trimmed organza; specially woven tweed jackets with sleeve over sleeve or cropped to cuff length; coats with elaborate frogs and conservative flat loafers that, except for the embroidered bullion anchors on the instep, looked country club fit.
Much of it evidenced Mr. Browne’s drunkenness and his growing mastery of haute couture materials and techniques. What made the show memorable, however, was a raunchy detour into Tom of Finland territory. Namely: anchor-piercing panties embroidered with the Prince of Wales and men’s skirts slung off the shoulders and worn over red, white, and blue jockstraps that revealed generous views of the plumber… shall we say thoracic cleavage.
That none of it was in the least bit erotic was no surprise. When Tom Ford let it all hang out in 1997 with an infamous Gucci thong now selling for $6,000 on eBay, you knew exactly what he had in mind. Mr. Browne’s relationship to overt sexual heat is more austere. Still, you can count on seeing those jockstraps next year on the beach at Fire Island Pines.
Just three hours later and just over a mile away at the Palais de Tokyo, Mr. Slimane produced a true season finale with a Celine show that was equal parts Glastonbury and “The Day of the Locust”. Countless thousands of fans spent the night along the Seine outside the Trocadero and waited until northern twilight to see BTS’s pop idol V, South Korean actor Park Bo-gum, and Blackpink’s Thai rapper and singer Lisa. Tsunamis of sycophantic screams greeted the performers when they finally arrived, around 10 pm, though few in the audience inside could have named the stars all the fuss was about.
Slimane, 53, and Browne, 56, are each troublemakers in their own way. Each has managed the feat of meeting the commercial demands of the big houses (Celine is owned by LVMH and Thom Browne by Zegna) without compromising on personal vision. Both draw heavily on American archetypes, whether they be surfers, sailors, cowboys, pro tennis players, LA punks, or rockers. Being gay men with an inherently different perspective on cisgender identity, they tend to question what is conventional by reflex. This contributes to what may be one of the least talked about fashion trends of our time. Mr. Slimane or Mr. Browne (or Alessandro Michele at Gucci, for that matter) are not likely to be mistaken for Judith Butler. However, they unquestionably continue with their work.
Slimane’s show revisited motifs he’s rarely abandoned: shimmering sequined jackets and quilted silver bombers, sequined tunics and skinny jeans and all the apparel associated with a mostly fantastical breed of rocker. Her clothes were worn, as usual, hungry with chests sunken and legs like pipe cleaners. Mr. Slimane is based on a very specific physical ideal. So if you plan on fitting into any of these things, you’d better skip the Rocky Road pint.
More than anything, however, the evening was memorable for its music, another Slimane signature. The propulsive bass beats of Brooklyn outfit Gustaf’s song “Design” set the tone, filling a large chamber where distorting mirrors were raised and lowered from the ceiling as the lead singer shouted the song’s dystopian lyrics. “People get used to terrible things”, he sang he: Isn’t it true?
Overall, a packed Paris Fashion Week marked the city’s return to its pre-pandemic status as one of the world’s top style and tourist destinations. Unfortunately, masking was rare, and many shows were what six months ago would have been condemned as superspreading events. Even so, the mood remained upbeat. Even the collections that felt like expensively staged placeholders: Givenchy gave us elaborately torn pants and balaclavas; Kim Jones in Dior Men, her impeccable yet prim tailoring; Junya Watanabe, a variety of workwear images of Warhol, Haring and Basquiat that ventured into Uniqlo territory, were more than offset by the joy (as in Nigo’s sunny sophomore outing for Kenzo, which looked like a bit like a collection by Anna Sui from 40 years ago) or true poetry.
At Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, Rei Kawakubo’s models wore what looked like pig-snout masks, stiff wigs, and harlequin-patterned trousers beneath hoop-hem frock coats that inevitably evoked the period before the French Revolution. In Homme Plissé Issey Miyake, dancers from Chaillot Théâtre National de la Danse descended from a scaffold to fly or run through a sunlit interior. Models rocked pleated coats and jackets and curved hems, culottes and shorts and pants, some with silhouettes inspired by the structure of lily pads: serenely organic, all of it, and fresh again since discovered by professional athletes.
Subtle humanity is always at play in Rick Owens, who claimed to have been inspired by his latest collection on a recent visit to Egypt. Watching the outdoor spectacle under the scorching sun of an abnormally hot June, he felt as if even older civilizations might have been on his mind. You know, the ones populated by creatures from distant planets. The swept hems, the oil-slick iridescent fabrics, the tapered shoulders, the chiffon wraps whose creative starting point was a mosquito net, all looked like what an alien might pull out of the closet for a summer weekend with earthlings. Think of the three flaming orbs that Mr. Owens suspended from a crane as hostess gifts.
Like Mr. Owens, Craig Green has an occasional tendency to make the humans within his designs seem almost provisional. Encased in one of Mr. Green’s exoskeletal constructs (twisted shells or ice boat platforms), the models may resemble less flesh-and-blood beings than vehicles for abstraction. Add things as disorienting as stirrups that dangle from belts and chokers with center pieces that resemble breathing prostheses, and things get spooky. Then suddenly Mr. Green presents a series of softly enveloping quilted pieces in pale pastel hues and draws you in. The tug-of-war tension between attraction and repulsion forces one to reflect on the ways in which fashion is inevitably more than clothing.
Except when it’s not. Season after season, Véronique Nichanian at Hermès produces tonal-balanced, superbly crafted, and (spoiler alert) wonderfully wearable menswear specifically for those who never have to look at a price tag. With its measured proportions, mix of shapes and patterns (shorts and trousers, jackets deconstructed over baggy schoolboy shorts, faded checks and hazy grids), the show, staged in the cobbled courtyard of the historic Manufacture des Gobelins, presented an ideal platonic mens clothing
After 33 years on the job, and as the preeminent designer of luxury menswear, Ms. Nichanian has never looked better. And, whether intentional or not, her collection conveyed a potentially stealthy political message in its patterned seahorses on sweaters. A defining sexual difference between seahorses is that males of the Syngnathid family possess a brood pouch. In it they fertilize and incubate the eggs. It is the male seahorse that finally gives birth.
Source: www.nytimes.com