An antidote to the Instagram age
LAST week, at the opening of the haute couture season, in the gardens of Les Invalides, the gold-domed monument to France’s military history where Napoleon is buried, Christian Dior created the world yet to be explored: Wooden crocodiles roamed over arid earth; giraffes through stands of bamboo; and eagles soared overhead beneath the canopy of a suspended map by artist Pietro Ruffo.
The next day, in the Grand Palais, Chanel rebuilt the Eiffel Tower, its girders reaching upwards towards the glass ceiling, while in the shade of the structure’s enormous metal limbs were assorted potted trees and green folding chairs meant to mimic Paris’s most famous parks.
And the day after that, Jean Paul Gaultier ended his show with a model riding a bicycle chariot festooned with lace and feathers down the runway as snow fell behind and on either side the video lights of hundreds of iPhones illuminated her way.
We live in a world of public performance, where every moment is recorded, shared and assessed, only to disappear seconds later under an avalanche of new posts. When even the White House is not immune to the siren call of social media, how can fashion resist?
Yet by definition couture – clothes that take a seamstress hundreds and even thousands of hours to make by hand, which are meant to last over decades and made for a single individual, to her body and her specifications – derives its worth from the experience of intimacy. The tension between value systems was the subtext of the week.
This particular discipline may be the most inaccessible of the whole clothing world, but it’s a microcosm for a debate over an issue to which we can all, on some level, relate. Whether we can wear the stuff or not.
There were other concerns, of course, running through the collections: the pulling down of borders and the lowering of barriers to entry, as couture welcomed US ready-to-wear labels Proenza Schouler and Rodarte, who merged their signature conceptual urbanity and twisted prettiness with the discipline of craft and classicism and were the better for it.
But as Pierpaolo Piccioli, creative director of Valentino, said before a breakthrough couture show, “We are in a moment where everything is visible, where everything is said, so what becomes special is what you don’t see.” That was his theory anyway. He was not alone.
Indeed, Giorgio Armani’s entire collection was practically a metaphor for the idea. Titled “Mystery”, it featured layers of veiling over embroidery, shadowing painterly prints and creating a scrim of evening promise. Although the rationale behind some looks, especially the hobble skirts, was too much of a mystery to understand.
What you don’t see is, after all, what couture is really good at: the painstaking stitches required to encrust every inch of an otherwise simple little Giambattista Valli 1960s minidress with paillettes of flowers; the wearable sound waves of Iris Van Herpen’s marriage of technology and craft.
Even the inside of the Maison Margiela atelier, which guests were invited to enter after the label lost its previous site to a memorial for French politician and feminist champion Simone Veil. It turned out to be a lucky accident, as the inside-out nature of designer John Galliano’s clothes, which focused on the basic building blocks of glamour – the corset, the nylon stocking, the trench coat – and then combined them with the everyday (Fair Isle knits, tweeds) to elevate their essence, demanded attention. The better to realise that a belted corset composed of stalagmitelike shades of corrugated cardboard was ac- tually organza, for example
Increasingly, however, the pleasure of connoisseurship seems to be forgotten in the drive to attract more and more eyeballs. But the choice does not come without a cost, and the trade-off was clear on the catwalk.
After all, the prize for Instagram interaction was won by – according to analytics from the platform – Dior, Chanel and Elie Saab, the latter known for a royal court’s worth of warrior queen confections that wear all the workmanship on the sleeve (and skirt and train). They could blind you with embroidery. And yet the lingering memory of Dior and Chanel was the scale of the sets, which dwarfed the comparatively low-key clothes on the runway.
At Dior, in a show inspired in equal parts by the daywear in the archives of M Dior and female explorers like Amelia Earhart, Freya Stark and Louise Boyd, the palette was earthy and angsty, the silhouette curved in at the waist from a small, soft shoulder and belled out to the calf, and the decoration was minimal: Embroidery on jackets and coats mapped, literally, the world.
Just as the oversize curves of shoulders at Chanel, where full-coverage clothes seemed the order of the day, from skirts tentlike and midcalf or skinny and spilling long under tunics to thigh-high leather boots and detachable gauntlet sleeves, couldn’t compete with the ersatz monument around them.
Lagerfeld took a different approach at Fendi. His third haute fourrure show might have been held in the art deco environs of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, but the stage was merely a backdrop to a collection that was a master class in transforming the tenets of impressionism into clothing.
A pointillist landscape on an egg-shape cape turned out to be made from thousands of tiny fur paillettes. The daisies and poppies and pastel blooms on an evening capelet were carved from fur. Ditto the jacket and pencil skirt of a suit, shaved thin as wool and traced by inky blooms, although the only way, really, to tell was to get up close and see it with your own eyes. Even then it would be hard to know for sure.
It’s this understanding, like a whispered secret, that makes the couture so alluring. As an argument for eschewing the quick-hit allure of the Instagram moment in favour of the individual detail, it’s powerfully convincing.