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Guy Trebay on some Paris shows.

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  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    Guy Trebay on some Paris shows.



    I thought it was a pretty good article, and witty (as usual).

    March 1, 2007

    Fashion Diary


    Folk Wear for the World











    PARIS




    WHEN it comes to figuring out what drives fashion and what the
    people who make it may be trying to tell us, sometimes a light bulb
    goes on, literally. This occurred on Monday at the Viktor & Rolf
    show, when the Dutch designers staged a runway presentation that had
    each model entering a darkened space with an elaborate metal armature
    protruding from her clothing and equipped with speakers playing
    different strains of music and spotlights that framed her in a solitary
    nimbus.




    The obvious message, that we are fast becoming solipsistic units of
    consumption, each moving around in an alienated personal theater of the
    self, barely merits a yawn. And the point could have been made less
    cumbersomely had each model come out with her iPod ear buds plugged in
    and illuminated in the eerie blue glow of a P.D.A. or a cellphone.




    Behind a lugubrious staging that did little to disguise some fairly
    clunky designs was another and more urgent communication, one that
    already looks like a theme. You could detect it in the perverse
    high-heeled wooden clogs the models were made to wear at Viktor &
    Rolf and the patterns in the clothes ? taken, the designers said later,
    from Dutch folk costumes and tapestry.




    You could note it again at a Balenciaga show that invoked so many of
    what used to be called ethnic influences ? kimono, ikat prints, folk
    embroideries from Eastern Europe, Moroccan coin ornaments, Peruvian
    peasant blankets and Tyrolean boiled wool ? that it seemed like a
    luxury goods tour bus had crashed into an outlet of Crafts Caravan.




    You could even detect the motif in a kooky gesture Jean Paul
    Gaultier made at his show, which opened with the Canadian model Coco
    Rocha performing a Celtic dance. (As it happens, Ms. Rocha was
    discovered at an Irish dance festival; those model scouts really get
    around.)




    Good reasons exist to feel nostalgia for a time before industrial
    corporate culture had begun flattening the dimensions of the global
    landscape; fashion designers have no corner on that sentiment. But as
    the most obvious beneficiaries of cross-cultural pollination and the
    visual wealth of traditional folkways, designers who are sounding the
    alarm on global homogenization make a certain kind of sense. This is
    not to suggest that any of them were consciously doing so.




    ?It?s a street mix, with symbols and colors that are very
    multicultural,? Nicolas Ghesquiere told Style.com before the Balenciaga
    show. It was a curious thing to hear from a designer based in a place
    where memories of the 2005 class and race riots remain fresh and in a
    country where a platform of inclusion may turn out to have been a drag
    on the political aspirations of the Socialist Party candidate for the
    French presidency, Ségolène Royal.




    It is probably worth remembering that Balenciaga is the property of
    the Gucci Group, one of three multinational luxury goods companies
    (Pinault Printemps Redoute and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton are the
    others) that among them control an estimated 500 global brands, and
    that the Viktor & Rolf label is backed by the French cosmetics
    giant L?Oréal.




    What would fashion be, though, without contradictions? Take
    underfed models, a subject that just a month ago rated a full tabloid
    workup and that also inspired plenty of hand-wringing in the industry.
    What happened to the issue taken up so earnestly in New York at a news
    conference sponsored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Vogue in the Bryant Park tents? The fashion pack switched continents. The skinny model thing disappeared.




    Not a whisper was heard, over 10 days spent backstage in two cities
    ? first Milan and then the French capital ? about bulimia, anorexia or
    the fairly distressing (and by no means secret) reality that many
    models are thin not merely because they are 15-year-old gamines but
    because they smoke as heavily as road-workers and keep their
    metabolisms racing with the help of drugs like Adderall XR, the
    amphetamine-based stimulant prescribed for children with
    attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.




    Those few models whose problems had seemed so obvious that their
    agents strategically pulled them out of the New York season were right
    back on the catwalks. If anyone felt concern for these poor stick
    figures, with their birdlike chests, their knobby knees and damaged
    expressions, the worry was hard to detect.




    Why be surprised? As with so much else in an appearance business,
    surface is everything and illusion shades easily into outright falsity.
    ?There?s so much about fashion that?s never real,? the Missouri-born
    cult designer Jeremy Scott said on Tuesday, standing in a converted
    church in the Marais where he was still casting that evening?s show.




    Called ?Happy Daze,? the show was Mr. Scott?s take on the malt-shop
    jukebox America of the ?50s, a time that looks a lot more hopeful and
    lively to someone born in the ?80s, as Mr. Scott was, than to anyone
    who happened to be alive at the time. It drew heavily on the thriving
    New Rave club scene that lately helped to put London back on the
    fashion map.




    Days ago in Milan, 60 motley personages from the London club Boom
    Box were flown in by the organizers of the Florence trade show Pitti
    Imagine, to inject some life into the drowsy local scene. And it
    worked.




    There was something completely tonic, in the context of a strong
    but clamped-down season, about the loony, unselfconscious spectacle of
    people like Kabir, a self-styled English fashion editor (of Drama, due
    in the spring) who wore a skirt as a cape and lamé trousers and also a
    crooked cheap toupee; or an apparition called The-O, who had styled
    himself in a tulle party dress of uncertain vintage, patent leather
    heels, with his lips and eyes smeared red and his head covered in a
    outstandingly ratty wig purchased at a thrift shop for 80 cents.




    ?The problem with these fashion people is that everybody?s wearing
    things that cost thousands and you don?t need to,? explained The-O, who
    lives in an East London squat and claimed never to spend more than $2
    for an article of clothing. ?You can look beautiful for just a few
    pounds. Add a bit of fake blood. That?s always good.?




    If the revitalized London scene has yet to produce design stars with
    commercial prospects (Gareth Pugh, hailed as the most promising
    newcomer on the scene, actually canceled the orders he got when he
    showed his first collection, ?so as not to tarnish the label?s
    potential by having it in too many retail outlets,? as he explained to
    the French magazine Numéro), it has served to remind people that the
    center needs the margins in order to survive.




    Fashion is ?going to break in half,? Mr. Scott predicted, unless a
    way can be found to reconcile the growing division between the global
    label machines and bands of independent creators looking to articulate
    personal visions through the medium of clothes. There is too much
    sameness, at the same time, too little connection between the fantasies
    being retailed by big fashion houses and the mixed-up, economically
    sensible way that most people really dress.




    ?Too many people are making clothes that look realistic and
    plausible on the runway, that are never going to happen,? Mr. Scott
    said. Why? They were never meant for production in the first place. ?So
    much of it is just a piece of boring something to promote an image, to
    sell underwear, handbags and perfume,? said the designer, wrapping
    himself against the chill in a wool poncho whose pattern of eyeballs
    probably looks even more trippy to someone at one of the so-called New
    Raves.




    ?I make fashion to provoke, to make you smile, whatever,? said Mr.
    Scott, who is ranked No. 31 on The Face magazine?s list of the most
    influential people in fashion. ?It can?t just be about consuming
    goods.?



    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine
  • sbw4224
    Senior Member
    • Sep 2006
    • 571

    #2
    Re: Guy Trebay on some Paris shows.

    Very good read. Thanks for the article.

    Comment

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