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.

Faisons un tour de Chinoiserie, 1977

Anyone who misapprehends the relationship between haute couture and the real world need look no further than the autumn of 1977 to see how the fashion trickle-down theory works.

Before we look at 1977, however, we need to jump forward eighteen months, to the early winter of 1979. It was just past Christmas, a time when retailers clear their windows of toy trains and Santas and life-sized polar bears and replace them with what used to uniformly be called cruise collections. Cruise collections are interchangeable with today's resort collections; they both labor under the erroneous and deluded assumption that the people struggling up the icy sidewalks outside Macy's on 34th Street have the wherewithal and leisure time to board a boat to Bermuda. In Macy's perfect world, we all do. There are no minimum-wage workers who have trimmed this window long into the night, long after the well-paid cashiers and the stockroom clerks have gone home to their luxury railroad apartments. The fifth-floor restroom attendant is off today, haven't you heard, headed for Miami F-L-A on the Eastern Airlines L-1011 Whisperjet.

Or perhaps the cruise displays are a bitter tonic as chilled as the winds off the river, reminding one of the panoply of experience in the human drama. Some scrub, some sail. The windows stay the same regardless.

On this bleak January morning, the window displays seem at a particular remove. We won't discover how the people who cannot enjoy the cruise but are expected to enjoy the window came to be the way they are; we are not concerned with causality. In fact, causality is a waste of our time except as respects what is on display in the windows. There, warming the gray outside with orange and yellow gels meant to represent the sun, is a tableau depicting a glamorous holiday in the South China Seas.

The color scheme of this collection is fiery. Reds, blacks, yellow, persimmons, celadons, blood oranges, a streak of purple like a Macau sunset. Feathers, fur, and satin trims decorate cuffs and collars; mannequins wear tassels on satin cords. Sarongs, coolie jackets, and frog closures abound; someone's been hitting the 100-proof Chinoiserie.

That someone is Yves St. Laurent, a designer whose haute couture will never be carried by Macy's or worn by Macy's sale-shopping subway riders. In the third week of July 1977, St. Laurent unveiled his autumn/winter 1977 collection--Collection Chinoise et Opium--and now the frozen office workers outside of Macy's window are gaping at thematic trickle-down in its purest and most relative form.

St. Laurent was on an exotic-destination high that summer of 1977, having earlier discoursed on Les Ballets Russes, gypsies, and peasants a l'Espagnole. Now he ventured onto the steppes of Outer Mongolia for a fantasy (but still wearable) collection, his most sumptuous to date. In a 2.5-hour runway show, St. Laurent sent models down the catwalk in Empress dresses (robes d'Imperatrice), pantalons, vests, jackets, and kimonos. These garments were rendered in suede, taffeta, silk, oilskin, damask, satin, and velvet with gold-thread embroidery, tassels and mink trim. The gold thread cost $200 a meter. Tatar and Chinese influences were equally represented in a triumph of aesthetic refinement. It was a banner year for St. Laurent and one that would be capped off by the release of the iconic Opium fragrance several months later. The fragrance was already completed by the time of the runway show, making for the rare occurrence of a singular runway collection having a brand-extension fragrance.

Opium and the couture collection were what inspired the China Seas mania that found its way to Macy's a year and a half later. Once inside the giant retail store, the influence proved not to be limited to a cruise collection. The entire main cosmetics and fragrance area had been redecorated to reflect the theme; tying into this was the release of the Estee Lauder fragrance Cinnabar, a heavy-handed Opium derivative. The accessories counter featured tiger-striped scarves and the tasseled necklaces seen on Jerry Hall in the advertisement above.

What St. Laurent had started was huge. This was no mere case of a color or a shape making a subtle, bastard mimcry in a cheap nylon sweater. Mass-market designers had aligned themselves with the collection's provenance and had expanded it southwards for summer, including bandeaux and turbans that would make appearances on the disco dance floors of the boroughs well into 1980.

The urgency with which the Chinoiserie was adopted spoke volumes about the influence of haute couture upon the mass market. The direct quotation of motif, mindset, and mood may have been lost on the frozen morning commuter, but it was absolute fashion homage at its most undeniably reverential.

Link: Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves St. Laurent