The Best and the Worst - Paris Haute Couture A/W 19-20
The biggest highlight was the weather cooling to a more reasonable 25. Given that the fashion industry doesn’t lay much store in air conditioning, the previous week’s 40+ could have thinned the ranks of the ungodly to an unseemly degree.
Next was the wonderful Lauren Hutton. She is amazing. As engaging as ever, she is great to be around, whether you are watching her walk for Valentino, or keeping her company when she sneaks out for a quick cigarette. If you are a model and worrying about whether your career is coming to a close at 25, look and learn. Your longevity in a notoriously fickle industry doesn’t depend on your plastic surgeon but on your attitude and personality. If you are fun to be with, you’ll be around for years.
Look at JPG. Who can resist a man who serves ice cream and champagne at his shows? He is the superstar who finds time for everyone, just as happy to be photographed with an unknown fan as with Catherine Deneuve. Fresh from the success of his Freak Show, this collection was as innovative, provocative, and exciting as ever. Nobody puts the fun into fashion like Jean Paul Gaultier which is why nobody turns down an invitation to the show. Alber Elbaz was there. It was great to see him and I hope he re-appears soon. He is too talented to be sitting on the sidelines for long.Rossy de Palma was also there. She appeared in the Freak Show, is one of JPG’s greatest supporters, and is always a delight.
Giambattista Valli took a different approach. There was no show. Instead, he exhibited his new collection at The Shangri La in a well-organised evening event which was like a mini-version of the V&A’s Dior exhibition. It was a great idea. The clothes were as great as always and everybody, from Chiara Ferragni to the delightful Giovanna Battaglia Engelbert, was there.
Just when I was beginning to wonder if anybody still understood haute couture, Stephane Roland restored my faith with an amazing show at the Opera Garnier. Everything was as it should be – the clothes were beautiful – and the collection showed a wide variety of materials, designs, and colours. How very different from Dior which appears to subscribe to the Henry Ford mantra about ‘making any colour as long as it is black’.
The good news from Dior is that there was only one tee shirt - even if it did open the collection. Perhaps the house is finally moving away from its puerile obsession with agitprop slogans. Let’s hope so as the industry needs more direction from the larger houses which seem to be stuck in a rut. Over at Chanel, the only thing that ever changes are the Grand Palais backdrops. It’s a little like watching Last Year in Marienbad on a loop.
As always, Giorgio Armani, produced a very elegant and polished show, with clothes which were not only sophisticated but also very wearable. Armani is one of the last of a generation of designers who built multi-national businesses from nothing by delivering what clients wanted. They are very different from many of today’s designers who have never built their own label but have worked their way through the corporate ranks of a fashion conglomerate.
And the worst of fashion week? That would be a toss-up between the Parisian traffic and the shows’ security arrangements.
Paris has a traffic problem at the best of times, but this wasn’t the best of times. Roadworks were everywhere so that anybody with a show more than 2 kilometres from the Place de la Concorde was running the risk of empty seats no matter how late the show started. Also, perhaps somebody could explain to President Macron that closing the rue du Faubourg St Honoré in front of the Élysée Palace to traffic sends all the wrong messages. How can you encourage tourists to return to your capital city when the President is so concerned about his safety that he closes a major road? Adding insult to injury, the pavement on the opposite side of the street to the palace which was always open – is now also closed in the evenings.
Lastly, while we are on the subject of security. I may not be Einstein, but I know how the fashion universe works. Here is one law. The less important the show, the more annoying and pointless the show’s security arrangements.
There is never any difficulty entering the important shows. The larger houses have concluded long ago that abusing their wealthier clients is probably a wrong turning on the road to commercial success. The newer houses seem to think that if they make it difficult for you to enter, you will start to believe that there is something special inside.
There isn’t. There is a cordon of black-suited, black-shirted, black-tied body-builders convinced that the addition of an ear-piece and a security badge has made them James Bond. It hasn’t. But perhaps they are not there to keep people out – but to keep them in. Now, there’s a thought…
