by Eugene Rabkin
"This women’s season, tampered by debilitating cold, held few surprises. Designers by and large stuck to what they do, but they did it so well that those of us who prefer to dig deep were satisfied. Those who prefer fashion to be some kind of an amusement park with clothes, not so much. I’m in the former camp for the most part, though I, too, get bored.
I also wanted to note that this season many designers really took advantage of what Paris has to offer in terms of location – from the stunning Hotel de Ville for Dries Van Noten to the Gothic church of Saint-Merri for Yang Li, to the ornate library at the Lycée Henry for Uma Wang.
For me the Paris Fashion Week began with the show of a relative Japanese newcomer, Anrealage. I have followed the brand for several years, and I still cannot make up my mind about it, which I like. Kunihiko Morinaga constantly experiments with physics through clothes – mostly in his fabric choices. His shows remind me a bit of the amazing experiments Hussein Chalayan conducted in the last decade, though they lack Chalayan’s philosophical framework. But there is some kind of philosophy in the clothes, and in the world of mindless consumption (Balenciaga) and empty sloganeering (Dior) that fashion has descended into, it feels good that someone still thinks in concepts. To wit, Morinaga explored the relationship between the body, the clothes, and physical power. He magnified garments threefold, and then shrunk them back with elastic. He used elastic tape, borrowed from kinesiology, to hold the garments to make argyle patterns. And finally, he used mechanochromic material that emits a more increasing amount of light the faster you move. How did it all look? Pretty satisfying. Besides all these experiments that few final customers will be privy to, there were some neat silhouettes and fabric combinations – and I particularly liked the three-layer skirts and the long coats, both in color and in monochrome.
The next day my first show was that of Dries Van Noten, and here was a bit of an oxymoron of a surprise. One thought that popped into my head was that while Van Noten manages to simultaneously have a pretty wide aesthetic direction – as opposed to say Ann Demeulemeester or Yohji Yamamoto – you still kind of know what you are going to get. And what we got was ornamental beauty of the first order – prints and brocades, sometimes broken up by metallic inserts. The show was inspired by Art Brut – or outsider art – though you would not be able to discern that if you did not have the press notes – at least I couldn’t. The thing with Van Noten is that even when he tackles edgy subjects – like Francis Bacon – he still softens them in his own way. Though I cannot help but wonder what it would look like if the master horse whisperer of the fashion world would give out a scream once in a while."
Read the full article on SZ-Mag
"This women’s season, tampered by debilitating cold, held few surprises. Designers by and large stuck to what they do, but they did it so well that those of us who prefer to dig deep were satisfied. Those who prefer fashion to be some kind of an amusement park with clothes, not so much. I’m in the former camp for the most part, though I, too, get bored.
I also wanted to note that this season many designers really took advantage of what Paris has to offer in terms of location – from the stunning Hotel de Ville for Dries Van Noten to the Gothic church of Saint-Merri for Yang Li, to the ornate library at the Lycée Henry for Uma Wang.
For me the Paris Fashion Week began with the show of a relative Japanese newcomer, Anrealage. I have followed the brand for several years, and I still cannot make up my mind about it, which I like. Kunihiko Morinaga constantly experiments with physics through clothes – mostly in his fabric choices. His shows remind me a bit of the amazing experiments Hussein Chalayan conducted in the last decade, though they lack Chalayan’s philosophical framework. But there is some kind of philosophy in the clothes, and in the world of mindless consumption (Balenciaga) and empty sloganeering (Dior) that fashion has descended into, it feels good that someone still thinks in concepts. To wit, Morinaga explored the relationship between the body, the clothes, and physical power. He magnified garments threefold, and then shrunk them back with elastic. He used elastic tape, borrowed from kinesiology, to hold the garments to make argyle patterns. And finally, he used mechanochromic material that emits a more increasing amount of light the faster you move. How did it all look? Pretty satisfying. Besides all these experiments that few final customers will be privy to, there were some neat silhouettes and fabric combinations – and I particularly liked the three-layer skirts and the long coats, both in color and in monochrome.
The next day my first show was that of Dries Van Noten, and here was a bit of an oxymoron of a surprise. One thought that popped into my head was that while Van Noten manages to simultaneously have a pretty wide aesthetic direction – as opposed to say Ann Demeulemeester or Yohji Yamamoto – you still kind of know what you are going to get. And what we got was ornamental beauty of the first order – prints and brocades, sometimes broken up by metallic inserts. The show was inspired by Art Brut – or outsider art – though you would not be able to discern that if you did not have the press notes – at least I couldn’t. The thing with Van Noten is that even when he tackles edgy subjects – like Francis Bacon – he still softens them in his own way. Though I cannot help but wonder what it would look like if the master horse whisperer of the fashion world would give out a scream once in a while."
Read the full article on SZ-Mag
Comment