Clothes for Life or Clothes as Costume?

PARIS — Clothes for life or clothes as costumes? The opening days of the men’s fashion week that kicked off in Paris had plenty of both.

Monday and Tuesday were marked by the supersized productions of LVMH, a company whose biggest fashion brands tend to favour grand entertainment to extract profit from today’s société du spectacle and its attention economy. Product is key but it is the storytelling that imbues it with added value.

Dior designer Jonathan Anderson is no stranger to brand building. But his urge to create something rather than simply market it feels stubborn. Set in the Musée Rodin in a cube lined inside and out with a velvet curtain, Anderson’s sophomore men’s outing was a step out of the neo-prep template devised last season towards something exuberant, messy, dirty, punky even, whist still weaving in signifiers of aristocracy and class. This is Dior after all.

“Fashion shows for me are territories to explore ideas, to make strong proposals,” he said during a preview. And a proposal it was: fey, ambiguous aristo-punks in skinny tailoring, stovepipes and brocades, donning skirts and field jackets, wrapped in the most decadent Poiret-inspired coats. Poiret, chez Dior? Sounds unlikely, but there is a story behind it, so good it sounds fabricated, though it’s actually real. Not long ago, Anderson discovered a plaque on the sidewalk in front of the Dior headquarters on Avenue Montaigne honouring Paul Poiret, who, in his heyday, occupied the very same premises. And that triggered a connection.

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It all made for a serving of blunt opulence, with the apparent randomness that’s Anderson’s signature — and not too much Poiret in the end. What’s interesting is how much the ghost of Hedi Slimane was present in the background, evoked not much by the skinny line and alt/lanky youth casting, but in the will to tap into subcultural territory, giving Dior Homme a depth of nuance that has long been missing. This, paired with the huge display of product, created a friction that, while calling for a vigorous edit and a clearer point of view, speaks to the state of contemporary creativity, and how it is treated within corporate fashion.

Huge displays of product are something Pharrell Williams truly luxuriates in. Steering away from the pomp and the loudness of the past — save for the odd, and rather sensational, stained glass trunk — his Louis Vuitton collection, entitled Timeless and sticking to the neutral palette that is so easily associated with class and “quiet luxury” these days, saw the designer charting pared-down, some might say normcore, waters: indeed, clothes for life, in thermo-regulating or light sensitive fabrics. Better still, clothes for lifestyle. At the center of the stage, underscoring the point, sat a lifesized wood and glass house — part Japan, part California — designed by Phartell together with Not A Hotel. But the effect felt lab-made and, despite all the beige, a little chilly: something the contrasting warmth of the gospel choir made only more evident.

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Lemaire’s Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran opted for a theatrical presentation in the amphitheatre of the Bastille Opera. Entitled “Mine Eyes” and devised with Nathalie Béasse, it consisted of a series of swift tableaux vivants that, although highly staged, felt oddly in sync with the tranche de vie feeling that is so defining of Lemaire. The collection stood out perfectly, its subtly erotic tension captured by the Roland Topor Line drawings used as prints.

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At Auralee, Ryota Iwai has always championed heightened normality. With an energetic brand of calm, he creates things that, at first glance, seem predictable — leather blousons, liquid coats, jeans, sweaters — but upon closer inspection reveal a rare ability to entice gestures: a certain way of putting one’s hands in one’s pockets, of letting a sweater fall to the hips. Reality, with a dash of magic. And this season, the profusion of colour made it all the more charming.

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Colour is a given at Walter Van Beirendonck, the perennial outsider who has managed to keep his inner child alive and kicking, but also kinky, for forty years now, with remarkable consistency and an elating lack of cynicism. Inspired by outsider art and, at once, bonkers and straightforward, the collection was Walter at his best: playful, naive, an herald of fashions one cannot find anywhere else, and yet intended for real life.

Clothes for life in strong, updated volumes and classic fabrications have been Ami’s forte since its inception — and are the reason why Alexandre Mattiussi’s project has grown so well. Over the years, he’s upped the design factor, steering away from timelessness in the direction of fashion, but overall Ami is a place of consistency, not one of reckless change. It’s by way of styling, of putting things together that seasonal improvements happen. This time around the mix had a well-to-do grunginess that felt too redolent of Michael Rider’s Celine. That was a misstep, but the clothes were covetable nonetheless.

Disclosure: LVMH is part of a group of investors who, together, hold a minority interest in The Business of Fashion. All investors have signed shareholders’ documentation guaranteeing BoF’s complete editorial independence.