Paris Fashion Week: Where a House Is a Home

Alber Elbaz's genius is wardrobing, a term that is familiar to salesclerks and not so commonplace among fashion designers. In retail, wardrobing goes hand in hand with "upselling," the practice of talking the customer into a complete outfit when she came in to buy a single blouse. Wardrobing also means building a working closet under one label, a concept Donna Karan perfected in the 1980s.

For the indecisive, a wardrobe is a solution. For the fickle, a wardrobe is a uniform.

Elbaz posits a view of dressing at a fundamental level. Women want ease and style, two demands that do not always peacefully coexist. Ease can mean sloppy, style can mean fussy. It's also been reported that women can be fickle and prone to sudden fits of mutiny. In fashion, that means jumping ship because of an unwearable collection or feeding the designer to the sharks.

A designer who wants to have his apparel as the main label in a woman's closet must avoid two things. First, he cannot be too conceptual. A forty-year-old lawyer does not win cases dressed as a chorus member of Starlight Express. Second, he must resist all temptation to épater le bourgeois, tempting though it may be. Shocking the middle class is an activity best left to teenagers. As Baudelaire would tell you, it also doesn't pay the rent.

Jeanne Lanvin, founder of the house that Elbaz made a home, was a pioneer in outfitting women for life. She also outfitted men and children and the home. The wizardry didn't stop there, however: Lanvin created Arpège.

The black Arpège boule epitomizes the Lanvin aesthetic. The bottle is a model of Art Deco design imprinted with a Paul Iribe depiction of Lanvin and her daughter Marguerite. Sleekly dignified, the boule cradles the legendary aldehydic composition. That fragrance, released in 1927, was the finishing touch in the effortless Lanvin wardrobe.

Lanvin designed simply and clearly, without contradiction or ambiguity. Her greatest achievement was in becoming a woman's ally and treating the relationship between couturière and client as a personal one. She was not an opportunist who fed on a client's neuroses. A client could trust Lanvin through a bond that was never betrayed by wayward or egotistical artistry. The Lanvin client did not wear the designer's peccadilloes on her sleeve.

Lanvin's second masterstroke was in never showing the type of stylistic hash that has crippled lesser designers.

It is with this same reliability and integrity that Elbaz directs the present House of Lanvin. Like Lanvin, Elbaz understands scale. When working away from the body, the trick is to keep proportion intact. This is why flabby satin jodhpurs do not work and one-sleeved satin dresses do. Design houses are full of exotic premise and promise and certain of them fly irregularity as a freak flag. You won't see Elbaz digging at the grave of history or art; this is one designer who will resist mimicking the limby distortions of Matisse.

For Fall 2008, Elbaz is once again about discretion and discernment. A Spartan coat dress the color of spilled mercury gets its dash not from frippery but from a razor-sharp cut. Lanvin's use of ribbon appears in Elbaz's work as ribbon fabric. A highly creative way of touching base with the past, the technique succeeds in even making a loose, strapless jumpsuit look not just possible, but desirable. As a whole, the collection was a concise statement about the ongoing potential of the antecedent. Rather than updating design, Elbaz updated premise. This is what separates him from the confusions that plague Chanel and Dior and keeps him right in tune with the current urban pitch.

No fashion critics seem able to agree on how things should be classified, and it can be quite interesting when people get grouchy. Fashion is like living; everyone wants to live well but some equate satisfaction with statement. Lanvin is for those who classify living as a fine and quiet art--l'art de vivre--and who categorize dressing as an exercise in reality, not alarm.

Images: Style.com

Paris Fashion Week: A City Where Great Ideas Perish, Done to Death by a Witticism

They say you can learn wit in Paris, as if wit weren't an inherent gift. There may be some basis in truth to this; people talk about being natural comedians when what they really mean is natural clowns. Buffoons, that is. Comedy and wit are two separate things and one must not confuse a belly laugh with a knowing smirk.

Good wit is arch and devastating and quite often le dernier mot. Molière excelled at those, as did Noel Coward. People have died from derniers mots.

The most famous last word, however, is the one that you think of after it could have done you some good. This is "l'esprit de l'escalier," that droll turn of phrase one utters in hindsight, past the point of effectiveness. This is also fatal...to one's ego.

There are legions of people who find that fashion must have wit and there are others who expect fashion to provide solutions. Then there is a troubling group that demands constant change; these misguided souls would reinvent the human form through design deformity that generally involves materials best reserved for automobiles and mattresses.

Those who look for solution would have a difficult time grappling with Olivier Theyskens' woodland romp for Nina Ricci. Even as we seek to make our lives easier through gadgetry, we do not apply the same innovations to fashion. How else can one explain heel-less shoes or trousers with three legs that are meant to be worn by two men?

Most women expect fashion to provide remedy (or at least counterbalance). Expectation runs highest with bras, bathing suits, and trousers. Fashion editors have dined out on these problems for years, creating reams of editorial about slimming cuts and colors. There hasn't been a fashion editor yet who has downplayed the threat to women's sanity and self-confidence inherent in unbecoming design.

Olivier Theyskens is a man who used to understand women. Somewhere on his journey down the runways of Nina Ricci, he has wandered into the no man's land of the universally unflattering.

The question is whether there is wit involved, and if so, was it once a great idea?

In designing trousers for his Fall 2008 collection, Theyskens has not only gone out of his way to avoid solutions, he has created problems. The trousers end at the ankle like Sikh dars and are long enough to replace socks. As the pants rise up the leg, they acquire more material, until somewhere around the thigh they begin to look like excess skin in dire need of liposuction.

Had the problems ended there, where a little outpatient surgery would have provided a more desirable profile, the only cavil would have been with the reflective properties of satin. But Theyskens continued up to the crotch, where extra material created a bloated--in the vernacular--camel toe. Camel toe has its place in history, along with Hammer pants, under the category of severe hazard.

Space precludes publishing all of the arguments against such design. Fashion thrives on the vicarious and the visual. There must be a payoff even in the face of fiscal and genetic impossibility. Fashion is also a magpie that feathers its nest with the sublime and the preposterous. Theyskens chose the latter for the bottom half of his fall collection.

Not all of this collection deliberately operated against women's best interests. The evening gowns and their mulchy, curried palette were fit for Titania. Costumey, you say? Hardly recompense for the dubious pants? Perhaps, but with a pastoral energy and warmth that feels comfortable--and maybe witty--in the middle of the industrial zone.

Image: Style.com
Title quote: Honoré de Balzac

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: History Is the Lie Commonly Agreed Upon

History is the lie commonly agreed upon, Voltaire remarked, and what he meant was that history was generally written by those who had a vested interest in making sure posterity was recorded in a select way. A couple of centuries later, someone comes along and stamps his subjectivity all over what was already a biased account and the whole thing becomes a record not of fact but of ego.

History translates to fashion in exactly the same way, minus the politics. Since few can resist rewriting history to include oneself and since artists tend to wield colorful paintbrushes, marrying royal history to the runway can be highly diverting.

One such diversion was John Galliano's revanchist men's collection based upon the frost fairs of Stuart England. The way Galliano had it, a frost fair looked quite a bit like the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, peopled by bloody and naked gay men parading around in leather masks, nooses, and designer briefs.

If Galliano's dissident revisionism was a bit too gory and homoerotically biased, then Alexander McQueen's was operatically romantic. The former was exempt from day-to-day living and the latter had a sorely needed grandeur.

The best way to view history is the way it was viewed in these two collections, as two sets of totally disconnected events. Forget about what happened in the five hundred years between 1450 and 1950, the two periods the designers used as inspiration. No doubt some glimpse of the House of Orange will eventually turn up on the catwalks.

McQueen's Fall 2008 collection partially considered the House of Windsor during the Norman Hartnell era. Hartnell began designing for the women of Windsor in the 1930s, at a time when the sun was still setting on the British Raj.

McQueen can be forgiven for a bit of ludicrous Anglomania, because, after all, he is English. And it was well-done Anglomania, wearable Anglomania, at least by Barbie. This is a textbook example of the trouble with preconception, of forcing one's view upon the historical bottom line. An ermine coat was fictionally reminiscent of Barbie's wardrobe, circa 1965. This is an American prejudice, although surely there must be an English cognate.

Equally doll-like were party frocks whose dense layering resembled that of tutus. These transitioned from the costumes of gothic music box figurines to--covered in feathers--the Swan Lake corps de ballet.

Also parading down the runway were snappy little military jackets worn over frothy King and I pants and a marvelously depressive hooded sweater dress that looked as if it might have originally belonged to an East End cockle seller.

You can see the limitations of a linear view of history. A collection like this one would be impossible to understand without the ability to make discoveries with each look. The scholar would want logic and the author perspective. McQueen would have to admit that his India was geographically misplaced in the vicinity of Thailand. Women would feel guilty for regressive fantasies and King Mongkut would want his pants back.

Perhaps history is only half an untruth.

Paris Fashion Week: Chanel's Accidental Muse

It's hard to be Mary Kate Olsen. A lot of pressure is attached to being inspirational, even if that inspiration comes not from inner poetry or inherent grace but from a scraggly head of hair. You'd expect to see that type of hip mess from radical designers, but not from Chanel. Amy Winehouse--a junkie Terpsichore--is alleged to have been the most recent inspiration for that venerable institution, but it was Ms. Olsen's hair that became the accidental muse for fall.

Hipness is very complex. If you think you can explain it in less than a dissertation then you are its polar opposite and you have never lived in Seattle or San Francisco. Trying to unscramble the puzzle of cool is like trying to decode the biological basis of consciousness.

Remember when Catherine Deneuve was muse to St. Laurent? That was a perfectly reasonable relationship; who didn't aspire to look like the Venus of French cinema? Even Lagerfeld's old muse, Claudia Schiffer, had similar selling points. But that was then, and now we take our muses where we can find them, raw from rehab clinics and the front pages of tabloids. Who has the last word in skid row chic? We like 'em anorexic, addled, and addicted. Our bedraggled fashion muses may be the visual equivalent of a bottle of Thunderbird, but this is completely defensible. Great art has come out of cheap wine and malignant culture. Punk rock, anyone? Trust me, we shouldn't have it any other way. If Mr. Lagerfeld wants to turn Mary Kate Olsen's unkempt hair into an aesthetic lobby, then we should stand up and let our vote be counted. Take a look in the mirror. Art always reflects both our best and our worst selves.

Mary Kate Olsen's messy mane was a subordinate clause of the Chanel Fall 2008 ready-to-wear collection. That collection was once again Chanel for the demoiselle, even if she appears to have aged slightly since the Spring 2008 outing. Chanel is a booby trap of a house where a designer must appeal to a clientele that ranges in age from 16 to 96. A designer must also never divorce himself from the weight of history while simultaneously keeping the biography current. The potential for polite calamity is what makes Lagerfeld so interesting to watch.

The primary aim of Chanel will always be keeping that golden bullet of a jacket as a principal weapon in the modern fashion arsenal; that is, to convince us that it is truly new and improved. This, you may intuit, is a cheat: A Chanel jacket is not software or an iPod or a missile guidance system. It may take a different silhouette, but functionally it is exactly the same. This time, Lagerfeld took two approaches in the name of innovation. In the first, he pulled in the waist and lengthened the bottom into a soft bell that was repeated in the sleeves. This was a mature treatment that caused the adolescent-looking models to appear as if they were engulfed in their mothers' St. John suits. What this means is that the suits were eminently wearable by society matrons and other such fabulous beasts. The second was a more traditional look at the classic shape, but with an interesting comment on reckless wealth. Only the very rich, Lagerfeld seemed to be saying, can slash wounds in their tweeds. Only they can get away with the type of affluenza in which luxury means so little that they can deface it on a whim; like burning hundred dollar bills and crashing Ferraris the point is not that you are rich enough to own the item, but that you are rich enough to treat it like waste.

The observer is complicit in this endgame, because it is he who allows himself the power to be shocked. Take away his response and the item returns to being a mere status symbol. It's a self-perpetuating cycle in which both parties require the full participation of the other.

The setting for this semiotic exercise was an oval wafer of a stage, in the center of which sat a working carousel. The carousel was decorated with those instantly recognizable tokens that make Chanel such a brand powerhouse: camellias, a pearl bracelet, a handbag, earrings, a hat, Chanel No. 5, and a ballet flat made into a sports car by perching it on wheels. It was a not-so-subtle reminder that accessories are the bread and butter of the couture houses.

Lagerfeld played with a tongued hemline this season. The curved outline wasn't as evocative in satin as it was in the thickness of a ribbed wool dress, where the heavier texture gave the garment the slab-like appearance of a radiation blanket. That shape also appeared--with little spatial logic--in tunics worn over long slit skirts and in a short-sleeved shift dress.

Since there is no such thing as true extremism at Chanel, the most daring ensemble was an evening duet that looked as if it belonged in the retro boudoir. Here, what appeared to be a Gay Nineties underpinning was topped by the sweep of a '50s peignoir. This one link to lacy eroticism was a reminder that no matter the era, Chanel is not just a house built on a foundation of smartly tailored day wear.

This collection also proved that Lagerfeld well understands the concept of how to transfer a signature away from a logo without undermining the impact of the brand.

For whatever reason, the models were made up to look drained. While this may have been another shrug at industry, it was hardly a sign of health. Neither is chromatically inexcusable acid-lemon eye shadow. But these are the petty condemnations of the middle class. Even Ms. Olsen, eyes concealed behind a giant pair of sunglasses, can see that.

Images: TFS

Paris Fashion Week: Requiem for Luxury

A lot of things aren't what they used to be. Big Macs, airline meals, the English language, and luxury have all taken big hits in the past decade. Luxury is in a particularly bad way. Now, things must be so slimmed down in the name of social responsibility that anything luxurious marks the buyer as an ignoramus.

Slimming down isn't always beneficial. Decreasing luxury won't take an inch off your waistline, and decreasing English is a national disaster.

Something odd has happened over the past decade. At the same time that luxury is being equated with obscenity, many luxury brands have been cheapened to the point of unrecognizability. Or luxury brands have bastardized and bootlegged their own product so perfectly that no one can tell the difference between a fake and an authorized fake.

There's been a strong tendency to go in the opposite direction, to reject luxury through sensibility. But sensibility tends to be the color of a mouse or a wet Parisian sidewalk on the gloomiest day of the year. Sensibility is insidious; it goes hand in hand with efficiency and a number of other do-good defining characteristics that are said to be healthy but that don't have that rich, full-fat taste.

Yves St. Laurent knew luxury when luxury was the innocent pastime of the gloriously rich. This was back when the world was a lot bigger and France had a monopoly on the best wine, cuisine, and couture. The end of that era coincided with the end of the self-indulgent eighties and it's been all downhill from there.

Fashion's new label is expectation. Expectation that the consumer won't do anything reprehensible, like wearing haute couture while not deliberating long and hard about the planet and one's responsibility to it. When was the last time you heard something naively described as "sumptuous"? St. Laurent knew from sumptuous: sumptuous peasants, sumptuous coolies, sumptuous Tatars. And smoking, let's not forget. Smoking! Dastardly. Looking at St. Laurent's body of work is looking at the death knell of irresponsibility. In as much as one's choice of clothing can be a reflection of both an actual and a fantasy persona, that much luxury on one mortal husk smacks of intemperance.

The luxury implied by the big French labels used to be aspirational. Not that your average punter waiting for the six o'clock commuter rail had the coin to rush over to Paris to be decked out à la Chinoise, but there were always the stockings and the perfume and the sunglasses as consolation. Then, somewhere in that rift between Boomer and X, luxury became equated with gaucherie, gluttony, and a lack of awareness.

Blame the gray market, blame the Internet, blame the strange allure of illiteracy. What had once been symbolic of luxury has depreciated to the point that it has token only in certain unattractive subcultures. It is tempting to say that their gratifications are not aligned with the sustenance of the privileged, and yet they are precisely the same thing. It's the feel-good factor that only serious commodification can provide. Once you can be one with the thing you desire, the thing has value only in so far as it affects the next chump downwind.

This is why today's fashions have to be blameless and above ethical question. You see it in the fall particularly, because at present anything you can visually equate to dead leaves and concrete must be on the right course. It's all over the fragrance industry, with the backlash against allergens, and you can see it in the fashion industry as well. Everywhere you look, sobriety and accountability rule. With some exceptions, color is looking like provocation. Step outside this proscription with a bit of flamboyance and there will be a trial of public opinion and perhaps a call for heads.

Into these difficult waters step the old-school design houses, but none more significantly than St. Laurent. During the 1970s, St. Laurent described luxury as something with a taste roughly equal to Perigord truffles. That is, far too silken and costly for any but the very wealthy. That was the legacy of the house, but the problem was how to keep the idea of it without making the diet version. Tom Ford tried and came up newly gluttonous; although his smut-chic looked and felt like luxury it was intrinsically debased currency with a stratospheric price tag.

In some instances, it looked as if it smelled of popper sweat and careless arrogance.

Taking over from Ford was Stefano Pilati, who had an impressive background in textiles. Pilati's test has been to make the label socially relevant and socially enlightened while maintaining the brand's value and integrity. In the face of those demands, Pilati has been a cautious and clever student.

Pilati's Fall 2008 outing hit the bull's eye of responsible luxury and desideratum. He understood that intimation is not always essential so long as the character remains strong. Over the course of several seasons, Pilati has quietly refined the idea of YSL into something with present consequence. His looks were freed from the body, free of speculation, and full of the verve of the original without indulging in the original's outsized savoir-vivre.

Ironically, one of the highest walls to scale at YSL has also been one of the easiest to climb: the huge bulkhead of St. Laurent's original work. What did YSL stand for, exactly? So thematically diverse is St. Laurent's cultural legacy that only the very wisest man could ignore the far-flung exotica while pursuing the global democratization. Right now, that means the facelessness of the individual and the devaluation of the individual's crassest commercial needs. This can only be accomplished as a group effort, a unified whole, but with a flick towards the old in a squared-off coolie jacket and baggy coolie pants. That was the most significant look in the collection and also the most telling; what once had been decadent was once again merely uniform. Things have truly come full circle.

Luxury. Price tag aside, today it's just a six-letter word.

Paris Fashion Week: Balenciaga's Aquawomen

Certain material tends to be used for certain apparel that is associated with certain minority pursuits. This is the long way around saying that latex is used for fetish clothing and fetish activities, whatever they may be. They may take more forms than you imagine.

Nicolas Ghesquière is known for maintaining form across his collections for Balenciaga. He is also known for working with an assortment of non-traditional materials like latex, plastic, and foam. How these have found a commercial home outside dungeons is one of fashion's bravest stories. Ghesquière mixes textures and impacts: rough/smooth, dull/shiny, matte/satin. He does this without pandering to fetish, an interest best left to the young, club-going English designers.

Ghesquière is also a master sculptor who goes far beyond a simple understanding of anatomy. If you were to give him, say, the contrapposto statue of David, he would clothe it impeccably, but he would also take into account the tautness of David's physique and the fact that--energetically--the right side of the statue differs markedly from the left.

A master designer would not stop there, however. There must be obstacles. Once David had been clothed according to modern mores and necessities, the designer might take on the challenge of the upper torso of the Venus de Milo, even if the waistband of her skirt suspiciously resembles one recently paraded down the runway by Yohji Yamamoto.

Challenges like these are too fundamental for someone of Ghesquière's advanced skill set, so for Fall 2008 he showed a collection with what looked like a creative abstraction of phylogeny, or evolutionary history. With the patent leather and latex that paraded down his catwalk, Ghesquière became a phylogenetic visionary. Either that or he was very much influenced by scuba divers.

Most designers will shape clothing more or less to standard human anatomy, unless they hope to remain in that potentially deadly category known as cult. Occasionally one of the more creative will take an aggressive artistic stance that is acceptable because of historical or cultural imperatives, but the rest will founder as their fan base marries and moves to the suburbs. These designers are generally in that group of artists who are unable to forsake momentary impulse for later financial success.

At Balenciaga, Ghesquière has spent a season or two retooling hips, and for Fall 2008 he has done the same with arms. Four months ago, he foreshadowed new arm treatments in his spring collection, but it wasn't until the fall grouping that he disconnected arms from the skeletal frame.

Short jackets cut from latex and heavy wool had the curious effect of making the arms look boneless and the shoulders appear as the sloped trunk of a salmon, as if both regions had undergone a reverse evolution to earlier taxa. Legs remained in evolutionary stasis, that is, they were one with us. Evolution, you see, is best accomplished slowly. The curious shape makes one wonder if Ghesquière imagines this as the ideal human form in another million years or whether these were simply impulsive aquawomen. It also fuels the conjecture that so-called conventional shapes may have no future applicability.

Beyond science, there was also an artistic question related to Impressionist painting: Does nature impress Ghesquière or is he making his own impression on nature? This new collection seems to argue for the latter, which would mean that his inspiration is not from the external world but has sprung up as mysteriously as life itself.

Dresses that conformed more literally to the body's outline caused an inescapable association with wet suits and the odd way that wet suits enhance the breastplate. Speaking of breastplates, they were there too, on the front of those very dresses, as shield-like voids in the middle of barren Japanese forests. Sound complicated? It wasn't. It just was.

Patent leather coats also demanded adaptation. These were garments that require the body to comply with their limitations if flattering silhouette were to be achieved across a full range of movement. Since this seems desirable, the coats were a bit counterintuitive; the inflexibility of patent leather means that the garment remains in place while the body turns. They would cry out to be hung up on airplanes, where looking chic was once an international requirement.

Ghesquière's loyal and considerable following will find much to wear in the remainder of the collection, most outstandingly in the form of a black cocktail dress with scalpel neckline and ridge-like peplum. Since this garment appeared to have been built for neither evolutionary exercise nor deep-sea diving, it feels like the safety of land.

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

Paris Fashion Week: Not in the Details

Lee Bontecou began to sculpt during a period of social, political, and philosophical flux that occurred with America's transition from the Atomic into the Space Age. In the late 1950s, America openly flexed its muscles on the worldwide stage as it raced towards space and nuclear domination. At the same time, the country was riding a pre-fab economic high that began at the end of World War Two. We were moving into the future not just confidently, but aggressively. Art--primarily in the field of design--reflected this futurity by streamlining buildings and their decor into dispassionate utilitarianism.

To move forward, to build for speed and efficiency, artists and architects had to do away with detail. Progress would only be hindered by sentimentalism and clutter. Half a century earlier, the Victorians had thrived on excessive and often incomprehensible feature. As the country embraced rapid technological advancement, the old forms of decoration became symbols of intellective calcification.

We were not a country without a need for comfort, however. Heaviness represented solidity, but it also represented outmoded intellectual patterns. America had always felt most comfortable in the past, even as it marched towards tomorrow. The new design aesthetic created an emblematic visual rift between traditional and modern values.

Although Scandinavia pioneered functional design, America quickly adopted it even as it refused Scandinavia's political neutrality and moderation. It was this perverted humanism that Lee Bontecou investigated through works that explored not just the scientific questions engendered in the race for space but also in America's escalating political interventionism.

An allegorical black hole was reiterated in many Bontecou sculptures of this period. The hole could be said to simultaneously represent the natural and the absurd. The artist was intrigued by both the boundlessness of space and the atrocities of man. From this perspective, the circle became a locus of reflection into which one could peer infinitely and without definite conclusion.

The sculptures' provocative abstractions appealed so much to Rick Owens that he happily cited them as the entire premise behind his Fall 2008 collection. Owens has been routinely pegged as a sartorial crypt keeper, someone who in the past could not climb out of the grave long enough to pull together a wholly wearable collection. His work has largely been seen as a collection of variables, some of them impossible. What had been carelessly labeled as "goth" is starting to seem more and more like anti-bourgeois. Owens is beyond chic, and as his body of work expands he appears to be making a statement about fashion's fallacy of detail. Detail exists on clothing for the bourgeois; Owens designs for those who must outline and master new worlds.

Through the use of visually primitive textures, Owens' Fall 2008 collection echoes Bontecou's use of common materials and objets trouvés as much as it does her actual geometry. Pelts and leather become carapaces and vestigial appendages from which the survivors of the new Ice Age can emerge. These modern-day Sabinas move past disaster and cataclysm blinded by their own hair, as if they haven't yet reacquired sight.

What might appear to be inexplicable detail--useless wings, unfurling leg warmers--is instead justifiable as a stage of evolution.

Bontecou was a superb inspiration for Owens, because her work demands a re-examination of our relationship to the past and the ideological divides between former assumptions and present-day realities. Certain designers ply these same seas with cynicism (and in goth this is often an implied state), but the Bontecou references remove cynicism and replace it with questions of control. Who will control the future? Who can survive today?

If it sounds as if Owens is treating fashion as a political vehicle, this is because he is currently at war with cirrhotic features that have no basis in truth. What Owens does best is to create fashion that is a pictorial representation of fighting back, even as it is clear that we will always have to return to the starting point.

Images: Style.com