BEAUTY: Clothing--Misc. Paris Fashion Week

Well, our fashion month is wrapped up and here are a few little details from the '19-'20 FW collections at Paris Fashion Week worth mentioning...

We saw a collage of his usual leather/corduroy/patchwork/Carhartt's vocabulary, but Junya Watanabe is certainly dedicated to presenting mature models. Kudos!

And the Milan Hundredth Monkey moment continued to a certain degree with more animal prints! Sacai showed jaguar on tops and bottoms.

http://www.sacai.jp/

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--Stella McCartney

It's taken her a while to get here but she finally did it. And I suppose I understand: children of famous parents often want to strike out on their own, without help from or reference to their famous parent(s). But for her Fall-Winter '19-'20 collection at Paris Fashion Week, Stella McCartney paid homage to her father's band. Now some of you who are of a certain age might need some explanation: Stella's father Paul was in a band... perhaps you have heard of them... The Beatles. And in 1969, the Fab Four released a film that turned out to be one of the most important and defining moments of the 60s. Called "Yellow Submarine," it was an animated psychedelic spectacle whose colors and shapes must have entertained a young Stella the first time around. But a recent viewing of the 4k-digitized restored version inspired her. "The last time, I saw it through the eyes of a child. This time, it blew my mind. I looked at it as a fashion designer and a creative person."

For this collection, she utilized images of not only her father but his fellow Beatles, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, and George Harrison (one of the models she chose looks more than a bit like Harrison). Called "All Together Now," this capsule collection features not only colorful, animated images of the band, but scenes from the film along with words ("LOVE") and graphics (look at the trench peppered with patches and you will see The Chief Blue Meanie at the bottom!) that appear in "Yellow Submarine." Additional suiting pieces and separates echo the looks The Beatles sported over the years. It's a lovely thing on so many levels...it is nice to see images and graphics from such a special film, the message of "All Together Now" and "LOVE" is needed now more than ever, and it is touching to see Stella embracing the world-changing work her father created both on a familial and global level.

https://www.stellamccartney.com
https://www.thebeatles.com/film/yellow-submarine

BEAUTY: Clothing--Ann Demeulemeester

Ann Demeulemeester's creative director Sébastien Meunier says he wanted to take the brand in an edgier direction. "Fashion is like rock music. There is no rock music without rebellion," he said. The house's Fall-Winter '19-'20 collection at Paris Fashion Week was indeed a bit rock n' roll, a bit neo-psychedelia, a bit punk, a bit grunge (I can see The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Cult, Nirvana...). But despite all that, the Romantic, swashbuckling roots of the house, its DNA if you will, still showed through. I personally love to add touches from other time periods to my own personal clothing choices, and a little bit of Edwardian glam never hurt anyone.

https://www.anndemeulemeester.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Rick Owens

Rick Owens titled his FW '19-'20 collection "LARRY." Shown at Paris Fashion Week, he explained that his inspiration was Larry LeGaspi, a designer and rock and roll costumer. In fact, Owens has been working on a book about LeGaspi for a few years now and it will be released through Rizzoli in October, at the time this collection will be available for purchase.

Owens told fashion journalist Luke Leitch, "For me, as a teenager growing up in Porterville, California, what Larry LeGaspi did was a huge thing—the way he infiltrated middle America with this subversive sensibility. He started out kind of inventing LaBelle’s look [around 1973]. Then Kiss took LaBelle’s look. He did stuff for Kiss [1974–1978] and then Grace Jones, Divine . . . So at the very beginning, he created that silver and black sleazy ’70s thing, to my eyes a combination of Art Deco and campy sci-fi. In fact, I found out later he was into the same sci-fi I was—the 1930s film of "The Shape of Things to Come," which kind of defined what "The Jetsons" did later. And Larry LeGaspi took it, too... He comes in and takes that and somehow, he connects with soul culture—black soul culture and music—with LaBelle. So that combination is already kind of a surprise, and then, with Kiss, he takes it into mainstream America, high school kids. And Kiss turns it into commedia dell’arte, kabuki, Greek tragedy masks . . . they add sex, lust, and vice. So all of this stuff coming together was very important to this kid in Porterville."

Because I am a man d'un age certain, I clearly recall Labelle and their larger-than-life costumes and of course the mega-band KISS with their larger-than-larger-than-life costumes! So of course the black and silver of KISS shows up in this collection along with some of the saturated jewel tones of LeGaspi's other creations. But Owens is a master for a reason: he does not imitate LeGaspi. He interprets LeGaspi through the Owens lens, so it feels referential but also totally unique since Owens has such a particular, defined vernacular. Kimono-like cuts, asymmetrical puffy coats, wide legged trousers, and the marvelous almost-ecclesiastical styling of an Owens ensemble (new: saddle bag pockets on the sides of overcoats!) are rendered in his unmistakable hand. But we need to take a moment to acknowledge the thoroughly incredible platform boot shown on these models. I am already pining for a pair.

Labelle

KISS

https://www.rickowens.eu

BEAUTY: Clothing--Siki Im

This wonderful, moody Fall-Winter '19-'20 collection from Siki Im is deceptively simple. But the simplicity ends up reading like architectural statements, and even pieces influenced by a Japanese aesthetic. I love Im's inspiration for this collection. He told Nick Ramsen at Vogue.com, "It’s about the roots, literally and metaphorically. I’ve been in the mountains a lot lately, from the Catskills to Whistler in British Columbia to hiking with my parents in South Korea. What I realized in these places is that you’re disconnected. Instagram doesn’t work. As a city kid, I think we need more of a balance."

The lookbook for the collection released at Paris Fashion Week, appropriately photographed in a snowy forest and styled like an iamamuwhoami video, is chilly and lyrical. Fur tabards establish a wild man mood while embroidered bare tree branches adorn sleeves and pant legs (look closely). In the lookbook notes, Im pointed out that many pieces had a poem by Pablo Neruda sewn on. The opening line of that poem reads: "Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips: Maybe it was the voice of the rain crying, a cracked bell, or a torn heart."

Gorgeous.

http://sikiim.com

BEAUTY: Clothing--Valentino and Undercover

The current creative director of Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli met Jun Takahashi of Undercover when Valentino put on its show in Tokyo at the end of last year. And the two hit it off, so much so that they decided to do a joint collection for their respective houses. And thus was born the following fascinating, hybridized, confusing FW '19-'20 collections shown back to back on the schedule at Paris Fashion Week.

With graphics done by Takahashi, the pair (shown as a conjoined V for Valentino and U for Undercover logo) utilized a visual narrative that explores the underground idea that Edgar Allan Poe was a time traveler (this is supposedly supported by the fact that several of his writings seem to have prophetic undertones to events that took place after his death). Pairing Poe's image with a face-obscuring UFO gives the idea a sort of loony-conspiracy theory edge...but the graphic as a whole is compelling. And then down the runway saunters Beethoven on a sweater and an overcoat...the why was continued at the Undercover show immediately following.

At Undercover, we see how Beethoven crept in. Takahashi was working with the classic Kubrick film "A Clockwork Orange" for inspiration (which KTZ's Marjan Pejoski expertly explored in his '15-'16 Fall-Winter collection here) and Alex, the lead character in the book by Anthony Burgess and subsequent 1971 film (played by Malcolm McDowell), is a rapturous fan of Beethoven. Of course you cannot cite "A Clockwork Orange" without showing the gang aspect and the violence. For the opening of the show, models wore phallic masks reminiscent of the infamous rape scene in the film while Wendy Carlos' original film score played. They also carried laser-pointer canes, an upgrade from the canes Alex and his Droogs carried in the film. In Takahashi's collection, sweaters were branded with words in the Nadsat argot, the future English-Russian hybrid language from "A Clockwork Orange," words like "prestoopnik" (a criminal), "choodessny" (wonderful), "bezoomy" (crazy), and a knit cap appropriately said "mozg" (brain). Some overcoats bore the distinct font from the Milk Bar in the filmed version of "A Clockwork Orange" and finally Beethoven shows up ("the ol' Ludwig Van" as Alex refers to him), again on outerwear. But what I find particularly fascinating about the clothing pieces themselves is that Takahashi managed, much like the fictional hybrid Nadsat English-Russian language, to cross pollinate the futuristic gang clothing from "A Clockwork Orange" with a kind of Medieval-Renaissance-y silhouette that is, dare I say it, somehow Romantic! When you really look at the costume choices from the film, the bowlers and canes did introduce a sartorial anachronism so it feels somehow natural to reference another time period on top of it all!

For those who have not seen the Kubrick film, here are some images for comparison:

https://www.valentino.com
http://undercoverism.com/