FASHION: 03 October

Dior’s Galliano goes back to basics in Paris show
Christian Dior’s showman designer John Galliano, who astounded the fashion world with gothic chic and mermaid gowns, yet again took his audience by surprise on Tuesday, this time by going for straightforward and understated.  To loud hip hop beats and “going back to basics, this is where it all began” lyrics, models with Joan of Arc hair styles paraded in sober gray and beige cotton or wool suits, or a khaki Audrey Hepburn-like sleeveless dress.  It was a tribute to Monsieur Dior, the designer who made soft shoulders, waspy waists and flowing skirts a trademark.  Under the glass cupola of the 1900 Grand Palais, Galliano showed the extent of his art in a beautifully-crafted beige silk embroidered wrapped dress with a revealing back or silk tops adorned in the front with discreet rows of small chain.  “Galliano is one of the greatest designers in the world. He loves the woman and makes her look good. He has originality and leaves great room to freedom of expression,” said Italian actress Monica Bellucci, the new face of Dior make-up.  American singers Lenny Kravitz and Janet Jackson lent further star power to the show, stirring a media frenzy as they arrived, fashionably late, at the Grand Palais.  “Dior is an extraordinary trademark … Mr Galliano is extremely creative,” Bernard Arnault, chairman of the LVMH luxury group which owns Dior. Asked whether the designer’s shows gave a lot of publicity for the brand, Arnault said: “Yes, judging by revenues. Sales have risen a lot.”  LVMH, which also owns the Louis Vuitton brand, TAG Heuer watches and Dom Perignon champagnes, last month reported a 46 percent rise in half-year net profits, reaping rewards from a global hunger for luxury goods.  Billowing evening dresses, in pink, beige or black, adorned with sequin, tiny buttons on the side and shoulder straps intertwining in the front or in the back, or one stunning pink number with a dramatic decollete, punctuated Galliano’s shows.  The man himself made a brief appearance on the catwalk, saluting a devout audience in a gray suit spiced up by a huge white pocket handkerchief and a Borsalino hat.

Balenciaga: Lucy Skywalkers Rule
We have seen the future of fashion, or at the very least, next spring and summer, and its name is Balenciaga.  In a strikingly cool collection, the house’s designer Nicolas Ghesquiere set a whole new direction for fashion – android chic. High-tech and hard-edged industrial, the collection transposed the models from familiar faces into the sexy knights of a fabulous round table.  “I wanted robotic and android, a beautiful future,” Ghesquiere told FWD backstage. He succeeded, banishing from our memories with one show the retro glut that was Milan.  Kicking off with re-worked tuxedos and dress shirts, cut close to the torso with power shoulders and priestess high collared white shirts, worn with cigarette pants and metallic belts – all of them looked chic, hot and thoroughly wearable.  Other great ideas included beautiful circuit board silk prints used in warrior robes, liquid gold and silver mesh pants, a Chinese dressing gown meets tuxedo coat and cosmic biker leather jackets with shoulder wings.  A trio of gold mesh dresses, each impeccably draped, evoked sighs from the carefully edited audience of just 150 people. A finale of woven strap Lucy Skywalker android pants garnered bursts of applause.  Ghesquiere’s fancy front row of Janet Jackson (with an immense heavy for security), soccer star and Japan’s biggest fashion victim, Hidetoshi Nakata, Parisian actresses Isabelle Huppert, Clemence Poesy and Joana Preiss and Amira Casar, appeared in awe by this beautiful collection.  The Olsen twins sat nearby open-mouthed throughout the show, as these pompous little munchkins got to see what a real, as opposed to celebrity, designer can do.  Ghesquiere also hit the mark with accessories which included a fantastic new high heel, composed of faux metallic straps and a machine tooled chain platform that everyone is going to want to wear. Plus, most models wore Balenciaga’s excellent new eyewear – wraparounds or goggles with chrome semi-circular studs, as if ground control was monitoring their every move.  Remarkably, Ghesquiere, the champion of bigger volumes in the past two seasons, went pencil thin for spring, showing a bare handful of the bigger proportions.  Backed up by a great soundtrack – DJ Michel Gaubert brilliantly mixed the abstract Hip-hop group Cut Chemist with doses of Salt-N-Pepa – it made for an epochal show.

Sharon Wauchob: Edgy and Embellished, but Evolving
No news can sometimes be good news, but in fashion, one expects designers to re-invent their collections every so often. Reinvention was not on the menu for Sharon Wauchob’s Spring 2007 collection, shown on a rainy Monday, October 2nd at the Sorbonne, France’s most prestigious university. However, fans of her deconstructivist play with passementarie won’t be disappointed.  This season, the Irish-born Wauchob riffed on the tuxedo in an almost all-black collection, save for a few token versions in white. Known to be a creative designer, Wauchob didn’t stray from her aesthetic of twisted garments that cascade with individual strips of fabric and ample trimmings, where the line between garment and accessory is blurred.  However, there were signs that Wauchob might be moving into a newer, slightly more refined direction. For example, for every jacket with exaggerated proportions (bell-shaped sleeves that extended past the hands or softly pointed oversized shoulders), she paired it with simple black cuffed trousers, some with a wide stain ribbon trim on the cuff or thin layer of tulle peeking out from the hem.  Other Wauchob signatures – thin jersey tops cut to drip off the body with layers of twisted fabric, held up by thin straps – were counterbalanced by more structured pieces like her best look in the show, a short, minimal pleated tent dress with cape sleeves. Other examples of pleating in the show were strong, like silk pleated ruffs with raw edges added as a detail to sleeves and collars.  If Wauchob continues in this direction – allowing key motifs to shine, like the pleating, without all the unnecessary embellishment added just for the sake of being complicated, this edgy designer will surely evolve into one with a level of sophistication she certainly is capable of.

Michel Klein: Sizzling for Spring
Talk about a big injection of sex and sass. Michel Klein, who’s built his career and strong US retail success on cultured expressions of the chic Parisian lady, ramped up the volume this season with a flesh revealing fashion moment on Monday, October 2nd in Paris.  Klein staged his Cher Michel collection in the Carrousel du Louvre, as big Barbie doll-like bad gals with huge hair strutted out, attired in flirty chopped up cocktails dresses or and power suits.  These came in color blocks of gray, white and black in cool wool or silk and all looked great. Worn with naughty, strapped heels and lots attitude, they were all a break from what Klein did before.  Once Klein did super sophisticated fare with lots of miniature buttons and trompe l’oeil, now he sent out animal print cocktails and red carpet silk robes that were so off the shoulder, one model showed a little too much skin all the way down the catwalk.  Huge, Charlie’s Angels-style mounds of hair topped the heads of a casting that featured the right mix of currently hot gals.  “I decided to do sexy, baby,” beamed Klein backstage, as Parisian chic gals like Ines de la Fressange and Georgina Brandolini embraced the designer.  Michel hits 50 over the weekend, although the designer plans to put the celebration on hold until this Friday with a private bacchanalia for his best Paris buddies. For a man at the half-century mark; this collection marked out a whole new life.

Gaultier, Westwood jostle fashion world in Paris
Jean-Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood showed in their latest ready-to-wear collections that they have lost none of the cutting edge that has made them the enfants terribles of fashion since the punk years in the 1970s.  Gaultier, who is celebrating his 30th anniversary in fashion treated the industry’s glitterati with a pre-show retrospective of some of the iconic clothes that made his fame — Madonna’s famous bustier cone, the denim sheath dress fringed with ostrich feathers, or the floor-length sailor gown.  “I like the eccentricity and the opulence,” Burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese told Reuters. “Everything he does is so unique. He’s continuously reinventing himself. He’s had the most iconic looks in the past 30 years, not quite like anyone else.”  Thirty years on, Gaultier again took the audience by surprise as he turned a catwalk into a fitness room, equipped with glittery exercise machines, sending models racing along in elaborate training suits, pumped up by songs such as Diana Ross’s 1982 hit “Muscles” and excerpts from aerobics classes. Wearing eyeshades and high-heeled Converse shoes, models paraded in baseball jackets in embroidered satin with shorts reading Gaultier on the buttocks as a recorded voice screamed encouragingly: “Now, we all want to have thighs of steel.”  A more chic Gaultier woman wears straight or puffed-out taffetas gowns, held by a large satin belt at the bosom, in electric blue, pink or orange. Model Lily Cole wore an emerald number shortened in the front to reveal some sporty Aladdin trousers, and topped with a sleeveless baseball jacket.  In a world where appearance often takes precedence on content, Gaultier played with fashion diktats, sending on the catwalk a Botero-esque woman, a wink at the recent controversy about underweight models, another in her 50s or men with long hair and heavy make-up paired with flappers-like women.  The sight of Gaultier leaping on the catwalk with a whistle in his mouth at the end of the show even drew a smile on the stony face of Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue magazine. CAN BARBIE HAVE A CONSCIENCE? This is the question Vivienne Westwood asked in her latest show, as the flame-haired style icon criticized the gap between the lavish universe of fashion and a poverty-plagued world.  “I designed a sort of Barbie doll in a box, with a hole in her head, totally spoilt,” Westwood told Reuters backstage after her show where some models paraded out with a mane of golden hair and large belts reading “I am expensive.”  “The message is ‘I am expensive and I am subsidized by all the poor people in the world’. We’re terribly spoilt. We have a responsibility to ourselves to do something,” she said, calling again for the release of Leonard Peltier, an American Indian activist convicted for the 1975 killing of two FBI agents.  The fashion grande dame, who launched the punk look in the 1970s, clashed fabrics and designs in patched-up dresses, a classic knee-length black suit with a Stetson hat, or customized T-shirts worn to a wrapped skirt with a puffed-out behind.  One ballroom gown’s bottom looked like a satin diaper or sumo fighter string and was covered up with a long trail in the back. The dress attracted appreciative whistles and cheers from a packed audience, watched by Janet Jackson and numerous buyers for Harrods, Galeries Lafayette or Japanese stores.  Some of the models were as cheeky as the fashion priestess herself, parading out with watering cans or smoking cigarettes like 1980s Westwoodian muse Sarah Stockbridge.