BEAUTY: Clothing--Misc. Paris Fashion Week

Paris Fashion Week showcasing collections for the '25'-26 Fall and Winter season wrapped and here are a few details that caught my attention:

Gloriously wide trousers at Dior Homme.

Chitose Abe's brand Sacai showed a collection that was inspired by children's author Maurice Sendak's classic book "Where The Wild Things Are." There were only a few pieces that spoke directly (an image of one of the Wild Things) or even indirectly (jackets with wooly fur like a Wild Thing) to Sendak's work...the rest was a collaboration with Ugg and Carhartt. Maurice was a friend of mine and I think he would have found this collection very...um...amusing (with a hairy eyebrow).

Fursac creative director Gauthier Borsarello looked back to a Paris of the 70s and 80s and came up with a small detail that made my heart sing: buttons, the kind that featured rock bands or pithy sayings from the 80s adorning sweaters like epaulets, and peeking out from lapels. I still have my huge collection of such buttons from the 80s (Duran Duran, Adam Ant, Nina Hagen, "Rude Boy," BowWowWow, David Bowie, Prince, Laurie Anderson, etc.) and they make an appearance on a denim jacket every now and then.

Feng Chen Wang showed some pretty cool 3D printed shoes in the shape of a traditional Chinese dragon.

And kudos to Bluemarble for using mature models.

https://www.dior.com/

https://www.sacai.jp/
https://fr.fursac.com/
https://fengchenwang.com/
https://bluemarbleparis.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Dior Homme

After seven years at Vuitton, Creative Director Kim Jones OBE has been at Dior for five years now. But he is indeed a busy man, taking over Fendi's womenswear collections after the death of Karl Lagerfeld. His influences and sartorial language are studied and varied, so for this SS '24 collection at Paris Fashion Week, he looked back in the Christian Dior archives to past collections. He pulled from previous Dior Creative Directors  Yves Saint Laurent, Gianfranco Ferré, and Marc Bohan, and used a rattan cane pattern from Dior himself. We get here a sense of an old, venerable fashion house...through cuts, Jones invokes the 1950s explosion of fashion with "the new silhouette"  but expressed in menswear. Like many other designers now, we get a sense of elements that might be traditionally feminine applied in a neutral way. The thing that tickles me the most is Jones' bejeweled knitwear tops and jackets inspired by 1950s women's sweater sets which were often embellished with pearls, sequins and gold or silver metallic thread, and worn simply robed over the shoulders and not with arms in the sleeves. The silhouette, cuts, patterns, colors, and presentation absolutely have a charming retro vibe.

Collection aside, please please please do look at the video of the collection to see the incredible staging and wow factor of the startling, opening moments!

https://www.dior.com/

BEAUTY: Painting--Alex Foxton

Just look at these amazing figurative and abstract figurative images by artist Alex Foxton. The gorgeous colors (so fearless in his use of color!), the dynamic compositions...so engaging and inspiring.

Foxton has worked in fashion--for Maison Martin Margiela and Vuitton--and has contributed art for clothing at Dior. Here is his take on a Hawaiian floral shirt:

And has modeled for Dior as well...so handsome.

https://www.alexfoxton.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Dior

For Dior Homme's Fall-Winter '20-'21 collection at Paris Fashion Week, creative director Kim Jones mined the Dior archives to bring elements and materials from 1950's haute-couture collections to this current menswear show. Of this collection, journalist Sarah Mower pointedly asks, "What if the 2020s are a time when it becomes completely anachronistic to think of clothes and fabrics being assigned by gender?" I hope she is right and I hope this is the last time I have to draw attention to the fact that men in this collection are wearing things like silk taffeta, pearl earrings, and opera gloves. They are not women's clothes, they are men's clothes because men are wearing them. A fabric is not gendered, it just is.

This glorious, stately collection is beautiful not only for the political and cultural statement I just outlined (and which we hope will normalize) but because of the simply gorgeous cuts of the garments themselves. This is one of those collections that require study since we are only able to see photos--but do click on each set and look at the exquisite detail of silhouette and material.

Equally as important is the deeper inspiration for Jones' collection: fashion stylist and jewelry designer Judy Blame (née Christopher Barnes) who had a fascinating and varied career. He ran a fashion-forward night club called Cha-Cha, helped shape the look and feel of the 1980s British magazines The Face and i-D, collaborated with club icon Leigh Bowery, was a stylist for Neneh Cherry, Boy George, Björk and Kylie Minogue, and worked with the fashion houses of John Galliano, Louis Vuitton, Gareth Pugh, and Comme des Garçons. But he was best known for his fantastical jewelry creations in which he extensively used found objects. To him, a safety pin was as beautiful as a diamond. Blame died two years ago this February and Jones created a special print for this collection in his honor. Instead of a Toile de Jouy, the traditional French fabric that shows bucolic, pastoral scenes from the 1700's, he blew it up and named it Toile de Judy. And there are some lovely pieces of jewelry that Blame would approve of. Take a look at the long, intriguing trinkets hanging off lapels and over pockets on jackets, or as necklaces, or dangling from belts.

Jones squeezed in one more homage: designer Marc Bohan had a 30-year career at the house (he even stepped in when then-creative director of Dior Yves Saint Laurent was called up for military service in 1960); a dazzling, show-closing bejeweled jacket of a pattern that looks like feathers was based on a dress from Bohan’s 1969 autumn-winter collection.

https://www.dior.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Dior Homme

Kim Jones, former director of Louis Vuitton, has been at the helm of Dior Homme for a year now and things seem to be going quite well. His FW '19-'20 collection at Paris Fashion Week was a virtuosic display of tailoring and couture. Combining the two gendered sides of the house of Dior--the classic business uniform suit for men and the draping of haute couture dresses for women--Jones seemed to break new ground in terms of structured yet elegantly flowing clothing for men.

Models stood stock-still like statues on a moving walkway as they glided by the audience. The suiting options included a marvelous detail: a long, trailing piece of fabric coming from inside a jacket at the lapel that can wrap around the torso like a cummerbund, or over the shoulder like a scarf while the excess wraps around the whole body to drape effortlessly from an arm or the other shoulder. Jones said, "That idea came from looking at the cut of a 1955 dress in the Dior archive. But I wanted it to have ease and elegance." Jones went even a bit farther back in France, before Dior, and took inspiration from the statues of French heroes and statesmen one sees around Paris ("I noticed how many of them are wearing armor," Jones said) by creating another detail: the vests and chest pieces seen below, some beaded with an indistinct animal face while others look like cargo vests, some are in zebra and panther, and still others look like flak jackets. Taffeta suits with contrasting side panels rounded out this amazing collection that feels smart and tight while simultaneously being unconstrained and elegant.

https://www.dior.com

BEAUTY: Clothing--Dior Homme

Kris Van Assche is a busy man--he designs not only his own eponymous label but for Dior Homme as well (Raf Simons takes care of the women's collections). And the Spring Summer '15 collection at Paris Fashion Week was visually lighthearted and fun, but the sense was rooted in history. Van Assche looked to the Dior archives for inspiration (as he did last season for the Fall Winter '14 -'15 collection here) and discovered a passage written by Christian Dior himself: "Traditions have to be maintained. In troubled times like ours, we must maintain these traditions, which are our luxury and the flower of our civilization."

Van Assche was so moved by this passage, he made it into a scribble pattern for jackets, coats, suits, and jeans (I wold love a pair!). The graphicness of this script devolved into colorful scribbles for the rest of the collection that looked a little 1980s, a little 1950s, and just fun...

http://www.diorhomme.com/