BEAUTY: Clothing--Misc. Paris Fashion Week SS '15

Paris Fashion Week has wrapped and here are some highlights and standouts:

Who knew jumpsuits would make an appearance again? 3.1 Philip Lim showed a blue version with pinstripes (the Hundredth Monkey moment for the season)...

...while Vuitton showed a collection based on Indian Shisha embroidery which attaches small mirrors, usually round, to fabric. Creative director Kim Jones is an adventurer and likes to travel to exotic lands. Past collections have seen Jones visit the Himalayas to research Bhutan silk brocade. For this collection, he traveled to India. And here we have Shisha on a flightsuit!

Another truly huge trend was the imagery and culture of Japan. McQueen showed a restrained collection of suits but festooned with the graphics from Kabuki theater make-up. Walter Van Beirendonck used Japanese silk brocades and a circular motif that looked like ancient Japanese family crests called Mon. Astrid Andersen showed sunset colored kimonos and accessories worn by Sumo wrestlers. AGI & SAM showed spartan, minimalist Zen-inspired pieces. And Craig Green showed us deconstructed Samurai padding in his highly-lauded anti-war statement. So it might be strange for me to point out that Junya Watanabe, a Japanese designer, showed a collection influenced by classical Japan, but look at Watanabe's past collections and see suits, Fair Isle knits, Depression-era patchwork work wear... so it is worth mentioning that Watanabe used traditional indigo blue boro, the traditional Japanese patchwork fabric of ancient peasant clothing. Models in lacquered hairpieces created by by Tomihiro Kono, and reminiscent of styles worn by Sumo wrestlers, wore boro or a close cousin, denim, decorated with Japanese designs of chrysanthemums, waves, dragons, or bamboo lattice.

Cerutti 1881 Paris: menswear designer Aldo Maria Camillo's recent trip to California sparked in his imagination a look that "surfed" between sportswear and suiting. Most of the collection did just that in a pleasant but plain way. But his silky tunics in Bohemian patterns fluttering under suit jackets were lovely...

...but what I really liked was the tasseled loafer-sandal, eerily close to what Ferragamo was showing, shown with toeless socks eerily similar to Andrea Pompilio!

And speaking of shoes, Miharayasuhiro found my weakness: metallic shoes. Look at those chukka boots--half or full metallic. The lace ups are great and the sneakers (trainers) are so fun. I actually have a pair of silver sneakers I bought years ago in Florence and I have worn them to death... I just love them.

https://www.31philliplim.com/
http://www.louisvuitton.com/
http://www.cerruti.com/
http://www.miharayasuhiro.jp/

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/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Comme des Garçons

Comme des Garçons' Rei Kawakubo, the house's creative director, has a mind that would be a fascinating place to visit. Her collections always feel effortlessly esoteric, as if the machinations of her brain are naturally obscure and thus hard to follow for us normal folk. I feel the same way when I listen to the mind-boggling multi-media artist Matthew Barney speak. Oh, I understand what he is saying, what he means, and how he got there. It's just that I would never have gone down that road. Her collections consist of entire leaps of thought, strange non-sequiturs, and mash-ups of the unlikeliest kind. It must be like Mister Toad's Wild Ride in her brain, with ideas careening and bouncing off each other like pinballs. Some collide and create the head-scratching, jaw-dropping dense artistic statements for which Comme des Garçons is known.

But this collection, upon closer inspection, ends up being not so obscure after all. It was a clear and concise anti-war statement (Kawakubo wrote slogans on her pieces like "Soldier For Peace" and "Peace, Love, and Empathy") that joined the other marvelous anti-war clothing statements this season like Frankie Morello's "Make Art Not War" collection at Milano Moda Uomo, and Craig Green's powerful "silent protest" and Matthew Miller's anti-war collection both at London Collections: Men.

Tim Blanks writing about this most recent Comme des Garçons collection at Style.com, as usual, articulates it perfectly:

"It is impossible to be a thinking person and not be mortified by the world's descent into sectarian mayhem, from Nigeria to Syria to Ukraine, and beyond that, to the school shootings, the rapes, the acts of random violence that darken the urban landscape by the day. And Rei Kawakubo is a thinking person. But her protest was mostly in the form of metaphor, those few word pieces aside. The show opened with cadet-smart outfits infected with primal animal prints, which were quickly joined by camouflage netting overlays, like an effort to cage the beast within. Another print looked like a child's scribble of shells exploding in the sky, a reminder of who war's real victims usually are. A double-breasted suit in lilac silk shantung, as straightforwardly alluring as any item Kawakubo has ever shown, was ensnared in a camo netting coat, which maybe had something to say about the way that war camouflages beauty. 'Anything war can do, peace can do better' was the expression of optimism on the back of one of the finale's graffiti pieces. They're only words, but words are all we have. And that might have been Kawakubo's final, poignant comment on our fundamental powerlessness in the face of the global epidemic of violence."

This is a perfect example of why I find haute couture at this level so fascinating. It is exactly like conceptual or abstract art. It is the artist finding something within or without and wishing to express this raw sentiment, this idea that has moved the artist. But how to do this? Painters work with paint, sculptors can work with wood, marble, steel, and writers of course use words. But artists who work in fashion use fabric and clothing materials to recreate this sentiment, to convey this idea. And very complicated, profound ideas can be communicated within this medium.

And about those shoes... Blanks is a scholar as well: "For a hundred or so years, from the late 14th century onward, a fashion persisted in Europe for a style of shoe called the krakow, with a toe so extravagantly long (called a poulaine) that it sometimes needed a whalebone or a string tied to the knee to keep it from getting in the way while its wearer was walking." The inference of course is that the shoe is so unwieldy and so impractical, it could only be worn for lounging or posing, pastimes that have nothing to do with combat...

http://www.comme-des-garcons.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Kris Van Assche

Belgian designer Kris Van Assche has been on my radar for a long time, but just barely. I look at his work, his collections, keep tabs...

But his Spring Summer '15 collection at Paris Fashion Week had my mind making connections... it is a fun, pleasant collection that made me flash on a certain teenage, high school milieu. There is a fresh, young masculinity to the pieces that reference school uniforms (I love the shorts and pants with knee vents!) with ties disappearing into odd extra pouches across the shirt, but also a young man's first suit. "I wanted to return to that time in a man's life when he is stepping out into the world, maybe for the first time, and he is eager to conquer it," Van Assche said at the show. But what I love about this collection is that the teenagers in question seem to be European, and they seem to be quietly emulating a kind of California style that includes puca shell necklaces, nylon bomber jackets, and flip flops and sandals. But if these young Frenchmen were to try to blend in with a California crowd, they would seem different somehow, a little too stylish in an indefinable way... their clothes would be cut a little too well, and with a little too much intellect...

http://www.krisvanassche.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Maison Martin Margiela

Have we talked about Maison Martin Margiela before? In the world of fashion, MMM is an oddity, and that's saying a lot. The house's namesake designer is notoriously reclusive (only a handful of photos of him actually exist) and actually left the company many years ago. Since then, the creative control has remained anonymous. What is known is that collections are created by a team of designers, again very mysterious: names are not known and faces are not seen. Much like the Oompa-Loompas in charge of the day to day workings of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, Maison Martin Margiela "workers" ("representatives?" or are they actually the "designers?--no one knows) will helm, chaperone, or otherwise direct press conferences, dispensing impersonal information about the collections and how they were created. And something the house has always been about is a sense of deconstruction (check out their hybridized, subtly Frankenstein-ish Spring Summer '14 collection here), of recycling/upcycling (see their Monoprix trash bag winter coats in this post about several collection from Fall-Winter '12-'13), and of using unexpected materials for clothing in unexpected ways. Generally the MMM collection is about pure experimentation with many pieces never even making it to production. Often other more accessible pieces make their way to retail, but it is the strange, stone-faced, anonymous art studio nature of the house that draws people in.

True to form, their Spring Summer '15 collection at Paris Fashion Week was expectedly unexpected. The hybridization here is much more obvious with halves of business and casual wear sewn together in a sort of schizophrenic Jekyll and Hyde statement. The lab--er, house--used nylons, particularly parachute material (one coat was made from a real vintage parachute) for pants, coats, jackets. At the end of the collection, a series of flesh colored clingy long sleeved nylon tops came out. The sequined and beaded colorful designs (which look as if they are hybrids of vintage advertising crossed with Soviet propaganda material) are chopped up and banded into nearly abstract stripes of color. The look is quite disorienting; it forced me to do a double take and study what was going on to understand it.

http://www.maisonmartinmargiela.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Walter Van Beirendonck

Walter Van Beirendonck's enduring fascination with Papua New Guinea was on display again in an amazing mash up with Japanese aesthetics in his Spring Summer '15 collection at Paris Fashion Week. He can always be counted on to deliver a collection that clearly pushes the concept of fashion into art. There is a fearless sort of freedom with what he does season after season. His concepts are always engaging, puzzling, sometimes disturbing, and expansively liberating. The concepts seem to soar up and around like wild birds, or lightning. One never knows from what direction it's all going to come. Ideas assemble themselves in astonishing ways in his mind.

And it is also an example of why I find the world of haute couture so compelling. Clothing at this level truly is performance art and sculpture. And what Van Beirendonck is saying with this collection is, as usual, layered, oblique, and full of references and inferences. Intricate Japanese brocades were the fabric of choice for kimono-like jackets with slashes and gussets; random discs of contrasting silk brocade were attached, looking like floating Japanese Mon, or ancient circular family crests. This morphs, in Van Beirendonck's imagination, into gold epaulets and military accoutrements (tassels, braided cord, what passes abstractly for medals and insignia) that bring to mind the Emperor Hirohito.

Then we are detoured to New Guinea--those sunglasses with the tusks and bones are amazing. It gives the look of the pierced nose of a Papua native. Why has no one ever thought to do that to sunglasses before? Tim Blanks at Style.com explains the rest of the collection well: "...given that the symbol for CCTV footage dominated WVB's show notes, it was clear what we were being protected from. In his eyes, an invasion of privacy was a mere precursor to God knows what other predations. There is no one else who can spark such dark thoughts with such seemingly joyous clothes. This show ended with models reconfigured as exotic tribal birdmen, their faces bifurcated by huge beaks. On one side of the divide, they were painted in monochrome, on the other, bright colors. WVB imagined surveillance cameras confused by the split, in the same way that warships in WWII were painted with op-art 'dazzle camouflage.' But he was also thinking about Papua New Guinea, a longtime fascination, and how aboriginal cultures grant a totemic significance to ordinary objects from the West. Sitting in the audience at a WVB show, you were compelled to reflect on the way the same fetishizing impulse applies to our own culture."

http://www.waltervanbeirendonck.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Haider Ackermann

This Spring Summer '15 menswear collection is only Haider Ackermann's third but we again see a gloriously loose, unkempt, slouchy silhouette. But unlike last season's English Dandys or French Symbolist poets, this season's inspiration was revealed to be Keith Richards! And Ackermann's vision was tweaked just enough to reflect a kind of decadent, louche, languor. Ackermann recently attended a Rolling Stones concert and said, "They're not my generation, but their energy was beyond fantastic. Keith took my scarf and wrapped it around his waist. There was just a natural decadence." He caught Richards' disheveled, whatever-is-at-hand uniform but interpreted it in his usual sumptuous silks, satins, and brocades. I adore the dropped crotch trousers, and the layering of texture and pattern. It still feels a bit like a Dandy or a Symbolist poet, despite the rock n' roll overtones. Just like Yamamoto, Ackermann can't help but make a collection that is romantic...

http://www.haiderackermann.be/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Milano Moda Uomo Misc. SS '15

Well, we have wrapepd up this year's Milano Moda Uomo for Spring Summer 2015 and here are a few highlights...

There are usually some good summer shoes to be seen here and there at the SS collections, but it seemed there was a plethora, more than usual, of fantastic sandals and versions thereof...

Iceberg showed some really fun strappy numbers in orange, blue, white, and aged leather!

Angela Missoni erected a geodesic domed yurt decorated with dream catchers for her sexy hippies to saunter through. The footwear of choice there was a multi-colored woven huarache, a type of shoe from Pre-Columbian Mexico!

The classic Missoni pattern seems to lend itself to the idea of South American clothing perfectly...

Ferragamo was founded by shoe maker Salvatore Ferragamo, so it makes sense that Massimiliano Giornetti, menswear designer for Ferragamo, would riff on classic shoe styles for summer sandals. I love how these look like they started out as tasseled and fringed brogues before having their fronts, backs, and sides lopped off!

And Giornetti created a fun little detail for the collection: a giraffe print that, combined with the cut of the clothing, suggests a safari in the 1950s!

And finally, Versace, whose clothing is never attractive to me, showed some really fun footwear: handpainted lace ups, stroppy sandals that look like twisted cloth, Gladiator sandals, and a pink suede lace up with cut out sides, suggesting a sandal more than being one!

Now on to some clothes! There was a lovely faded theme popping up at Fendi... denim in the collection was so faded, it simply read as the texture of a cotton cloud...

...and at Bottega Veneta, sweaters were beyond faded, they were bleached and aged by the elements, giving these pieces a wistful, timeworn sense.

http://www.iceberg.com/
http://www.missoni.com/
http://www.ferragamo.com/
http://www.versace.com/
http://www.fendi.com/
http://www.bottegaveneta.com/

BEAUTY : Clothing--Dsquared2

The Caten twins at Dsquared2 created a tribute to Andy Warhol for their Spring Summer '15 collection at Milano Moda Uomo. They titled the collection "Stud2io"--the runway was a facsimile of Andy's legendary Factory in Manhattan, complete with "Superstars" and various hangers-on. A remixed version of the late Lou Reed's fantastic "Walk On The Wild Side" kicked things off.

A Warhol-esque silk-screened portrait on a tee peeked out from under a jacket, Warhol-illustrated cats played on a sweatshirt, one tee simply announced "ANDY," and yet another tee was a Dsquared2 version of Warhol's famous Campbell's tomato soup cans. But the Catens did not stop there, in the 60s and 70s; they also invoked Warhol related artists from the 80s. Stephen Sprouse is a legendary name in fashion: he came to prominence in the 80s, using signature day-glo colors and graffiti-style prints. His first collection was presented at the last location of Warhol's Factory, and later in his career he utilized Warhol's day-glo camouflage (with Andy's permission) which is now interpreted for a third time by Dsquared2. Sprouse was also famous for letters and words scrawled in a graffiti pattern which he used liberally on everything from tights to scarves and bags for Louis Vuitton. This graffiti print also made an appearance in the Caten's show, spelling out "Dsquared." And finally, we see some references to Jean-Michel Basquiat, a Manhattan painter who collaborated with Andy on some later works. Basquiat's cartoon-y, scratchy doodle-like, tribal art can be seen here on denim jeans and tees. For good measure, there were brightly colored buttons worn on shirts for a full 1980s effect. Although the references in this show spanned three decades, it all hung together remarkably well, thanks to the legacy of Warhol.

http://dsquared2.com

BEAUTY: Clothing--Frankie Morello

Maurizio Modica and Pierfrancesco Gigliotti, the heads of Frankie Morello, have been exploring large, interesting, photographic prints for several seasons now, and for their Spring Summer '15 collection at Milano Moda Uomo titled "Make Art Not War," they used some very interesting images. They began with shirts, jackets, and coats covered with images from the final scene of Antonioni's incredible film "Zabriskie Point" (one of my favorite films on my film list to the right) in which the contents of an entire home are destroyed, item by item, in recurring ultra slow motion explosions, until finally the home is blown up as well. But Modica and Gigliotti like to imbue their collections with subtext and, perhaps more than any other designer, a progression or evolution of the theme. If one digs a little, one can usually discover what is an actual story in a Frankie Morello collection. After these filmed images of explosions, they presented fractured and digitally scrambled images of classical sculpture, and finally the actual slogan of the theme. From war to art, a civilizing effect... or possibly, considering the reference to Antonioni's film, we need to purge the dross of our lives to get to the real art.

http://www.frankiemorello.com/