Paris Fashion Week: The Greatest Show on Earth

All great showmen have one thing in common. It isn't that they know how to put on a show, and it isn't that they have the best or even the brightest talent. What great showmen share is a thorough understanding of the public and how you can never account for either the public's taste or the public's desire for blood.

The Romans and their Colosseum, the Brits and their bears, Buffalo Bill, and P. T. Barnum were all provocateurs of the highest caliber, as was Mike Todd. Mike Todd was possibly the flashiest huckster of the 20th century. In a remarkable feat of promotion, Todd turned Elizabeth Taylor the ingenue into Liz Taylor the spectacle. This he did in the crassest way possible, through sex and diamonds.

After decking Liz out in the world's most vulgar jewelry, any conciliation to good taste would have been like asking Cleopatra to hand over her barge and float down the Nile on an inner tube.

Todd knew that you had to give the public what it wanted, whether that be public executions (Roman), horrific maulings (British), savages (Cody), or freaks (Barnum). We might say that what the public wanted was a heightened human experience, so long as it was someone else's.

As we dry-dock ourselves into self-restraint, the showman and his spectacle become something of a national embarrassment. We've backed ourselves into a wall when our lone agents of old-fashioned showmanship are Britney Spears and the televised evangelists.

Paris, though, is permitted exaggeration. Even there a new moderation has begun to creep through the boulevards like a maudit de Dieu; one misstep and you're going straight down the passage d'Enfer with your tail blazing behind you. This is especially true if you put adult women in baby rompers or dress them up as clowns. Soon, we will all wear the colors of mourning and pigeons. The only person with a renewable license to (over) kill will be John Galliano.

John Galliano is beyond finite considerations or calls for temperance. He's the last of the great showmen in the greatest show on earth, and even when he delivers--as he did for Fall 2008--something with commercial appeal, he's still a long way from naturalism. At his most improbable--the odd-lot weddings of 2006, anyone?--he outmaneuvers fashion, and at his sanest he designs with the eye of a hardcore absinthe drinker.

Spending fall with Galliano means retreating to the 1960s through the prism of the 1920s and taking spectral addict and silent film star Nita Naldi along for the ride. In her decline, Naldi crept around Manhattan with a sunken face and eyes ringed with soot and sorrow. Much as Topanga Canyon flower children did in 1968, Galliano has raided Naldi's steamer trunk for inspiration. Within, the designer found a wardrobe that spanned from Poiret's cocoon coats to the girlish froth of English wartime cinema. In the hands of another designer, this type of collection might be viewed as an opportunistic documentary. To call it a survey is likewise incorrect. Exploration works, but only if you include an implicit shattering of illusion and the creation of a new, possibly more confusing one.

As is typical of Galliano, beautiful garments require cosmetic marks of distortion. Splotches of color ringed about the eyes remove any intimacy of identification; one of the showman's oldest tricks is to make you simultaneously the most and least important person in the room.

The whole collection recalled the importance of movement to fashion. Silks swirled below the knees, reminding us that shins and ankles were once erotic zones. Harem pants billowed and sleeves fluttered with tremendous range of flight and sense of space. Where Galliano showed heavier items like coats the garments seemed more like emotional textures than they did technical ones.

A keen eye will have spotted an homage to Schiaparelli's famous bow knot sweater of 1927.

The cynical might be tempted to say that Galliano never starts with a tabula rasa. Regardless of starting point, the designer always begins at what might be the end of another's imagination. Galliano is no empiricist. The past that he outlines is never the most convenient one, nor is it necessarily his. Galliano's greatest skill as a showman is his ability to convince us not to consider ourselves relative to his work, but to consider only his perspective and think we were very clever to have come up with it on our own.

Images: Style.com

Paris Fashion Week: Messiness is Your Dior

Nineteen sixty-one was a pretty good year. It may have been the last year we truly had something to be optimistic about, up until the Bay of Pigs proved that nothing was perfect, not even "plausible deniability." That's the year we elected Jack Kennedy to the White House, and remember how good that felt? Out with fuddy-duddy Ike and Mamie and in with Jack and Jackie; Jackie in particular. Old Joe may have poured millions into that campaign, but in the end it all came down to glamour. Glamour, in case you hadn't realized it, always prevails.

Camelot, they called it. A White House couched in terms of a mythical court and with the better half of it outfitted by Oleg Cassini.

Cassini understood something: Style is a remedy for whatever ails you. Socially, we were a provincial, potluck nation still dining out on tuna casserole. We were not chic. In certain quarters, we might have even been a bit of an embarrassment. You couldn't compete globally while dressing locally. That was the genius of Cassini, a European whose mother had been the darling of the D. C. social set during the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations and a dress designer subsequently.

Well-articulated elegance and simplicity became the key design components of Jackie's state wardrobe, and as a result that wardrobe became a polity unto itself. The First Lady prided herself on her French-Catholic lineage; she pronounced her name in the French manner. Much of what Cassini designed for Jackie might be termed borrowings, as one borrows words from mother tongues or recipes for sole à la Meunière from Larousse Gastronomique. Heavily influenced by master French couturier Hubert de Givenchy, Jackie's wardrobe was a sensation. The Frenchification of the United States was under way.

That Frenchification was returned to Paris by way of John Galliano's anti-anomic Dior Fall 2008 ready-to-wear collection. Anomie is today's hottest ticket. It's what happens when society goes to hell in a handbasket due to corruption of its principles. Designers, especially younger ones, do whole idealistic collections around this theme. They try to darn together what we are so desperate to rip apart, and when they can't they build clothing for new empires that will themselves eventually strike back.

Galliano's wayback machine backs up from a time when we want more out of life to a time when we just about had it (or so beer and cigarette advertisements claimed), and in doing so he has penetrated our conscious with clothing that appears to have been designed exclusively for us. This is not pigeon-toed perimeter apparel in the face of all that hipness. The new Fall collection is equal parts fond concept and crackerjack modern execution.

Bohan-era Dior may have been the professed jumping-off point, but it wasn't a parasitic one. Time-wise, the collection was a slideshow of the years 1961 through 1965 (that is, before the hippies and women's libbers turned this look into the uncoolest totem in town). Into this literal overlay of boxy, Cassini-like insights went with-it, Mod Manhattan, the Twist, and Nancy Sinatra. And there was limelight and maribou and an evening gown whose bouffant skirt was shaped just like rose hips.

It was beautiful, and what can you do with beauty but mar it?

Remember that perfection is dullness. Injury makes for distinction everywhere but on the wings of butterflies. Thus, Galliano made sure his models walked with crudely corrupted hair and makeup that were parodies of Yardley advertisements and a coiffure that was much harder to maintain than it looked. Ask your mother.

Beauty is messiness. Messiness is Your Dior. So is mimesis, in a way that just made the American legacy collections look arthritic.

Images: Style.com

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?: Dior Spring 2008 Couture

There is but one House of Dior, the fashion fiefdom of John Galliano and Galliano's massive sense of the operatic. There is also Christian Dior the brand (in the actual marketplace it is all Christian Dior Couture), which comprises everything else. The brand does a tremendous business in fragrance and cosmetics. Within the fragrance division, the brand is divided into the classic and the contemporary.

Where not discontinued, certain of the classic Dior fragrances (Miss Dior, Diorling, Diorama, Diorella, Diorissimo, Dioressence) are olfactory representatives of the New Look and its exaggerated femininity. At the other end of the spectrum, the contemporary scents (Addict, J'Adore, Miss Dior Cherie, and the Poison quintet) are designed for younger women. This youthful customer is unlikely to wear Galliano's haute couture or prêt-à-porter, unlike the original clients of Dior's New Look who wore the sharply elegant Miss Dior with their hourglass suits. The modern fragrances are one vehicle by which Dior is able to extend its brand beyond its couture clients.

Dior Addict is a separate brand within the group of modern fragrances. There are also Addict lip products. The Addict subdivision is designed to be hipper, more urban, and more aggressive than the rest of the beauty/fragrance products. More than a mere collection of glosses and eau de parfum, it's both a mindset and the rock-and-roll arm of Dior beauty.

Galliano's Spring 'o8 couture collection is classic Dior homage inhaled through Addict's grittier, post-modern straw. The evolutionary trajectory includes waypoints at New Look volume and pose; New Look millinery, St. Laurent trapeze, and Bohan asceticism. The collection was rendered in a color palette that might be described as radioactive. Against a crepuscular cobalt backdrop, it glowed.

Officially, the design inspirations were the John Singer Sargent portrait Madame X and the gold adornment of painter Gustav Klimt. Klimt, a Viennese Symbolist, excelled at gilding female eroticism. His subjects often had an attitude of condescension or remove, something they share with the Sargent work. Galliano evoked Klimt through extravagant gold embroidery and decoration that recalled Expectation, Medicine, and the oil and gold of The Kiss.

As originally painted, Madame X's decorative shoulder strap had eased off her right shoulder. The references to the painting were demonstrated in both design and contrast. Bodices cut in a manner similar to Madame X's infamous gown were foil to the cool luminescence of pale skin.

Galliano's aesthetic can be somewhat predictive, in this case as though it is sounding the death knell of the bourgeois. This was a collection of shapes based on a kinder, gentler and more democratic past. The exploration of volume and perversion of shape viz classic Dior gave the older designs a slight disenfranchisement, as if to deprive them of the catholic austerity they once possessed. Revived in nearly insolent color, they were electrified with Addict's Led Zep bass line.

Although not as extreme as prior collections, there was no feeling of a lowest common denominator or of pandering to the balefulness of the new moderation. As expected, there is a bold and distinct separation between Dior couture and that of other houses. Here, where Galliano is rewriting the house's iconic history to suit his own dramatic palate, he seems once again outside the question of who will guard the guards.

Jazz Babies

John Galliano knows from things Japonais, and his spring 2008 couture collection proves the designer is no stranger things literary either; his latest catwalk sensation is a romantic turn around the greatest hits of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Consider this dropped-waist flapper dress, and then consider the color. Orange! We haven't seen orange in years, and we certainly haven't seen it for spring. This fiery hue is usually set against autumn's leaves, but Galliano--on a winning streak after his oriental reiteration of the New Look--sends this color down the runway without any sense of seasonal displacement. The dress, and indeed the whole spring collection, has the strongest narrative line in a season with strong historically narrative statements. When he's at the top of his game, no one narrates better than Galliano. The twenties are back, baby, with a vengeance!

Style Snatcher would kill for some boy hips.

Image courtesy of Style.com