Paris couture week: Your round-up
Here are some highlights of the last day of haute couture week’s fall-winter displays
Rarely does the demure Paris couture week see a standing ovation.
Even rarer is the whooping and screaming that echoed around the gilded salons of the Hotel Salomon de Rothschild as Pierpaolo Piccioli took his bow following Valentino’s collection Wednesday evening.
Mika, Valentino Garavani, Natalia Vodianova and Tracee Ellis Ross all got to their feet as the rousing operatic voice of Maria Callas played out the sumptuous creations from what was the week’s strongest collection.
Here are some highlights of the last day of haute couture week fall-winter displays.
VALENTINO
With the stirring aria of Casta
Diva, the couture seemed to take as its starting point the glory days of the height of legend Callas’ career in the 1960s.
Giant brushed-back wig hair and an unstructured celadon blue silk gown with intricate intarsia cape opened the 63-look show in that era’s exaggerated style. It took 1,120 hours to make.
Large round multicoloured floral headpieces continued the retro feel. Loose, exaggerated plays on proportion then followed. Gargantuan scarfwraps surrounded the body; one came actually attached across the bust. Despite the size, the looks were never over-theatrical as Piccioli ensured to keep the proportions balanced, and in keeping with the models’ body size. One floor-sweeping feather dress could have been overpowering, but was modelled on 180cm model Kaia Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s daughter, with huge va-vavoom hair. It was archetypal dramatic couture.
JEANPAUL GAULTIER
A tardy Naomi Campbell triggered a media scrum as she entered. It raised the heat in the already scorching atmosphere. It’s been banned in public — but smoking, the theme of the fallwinter couture, has evidently not been outlawed as a source of fashion inspiration. The homage to one of the world’s dirtiest, and most glamorous, habits made for a collection of 73 looks. A variation on the red Fez hat from Morocco — famed for shisha pipes — made an appearance. Tulle mouth masks followed white plume boas. But a giant silver bridal veil was the most creative look. Its fivemeter train was so diaphanous, it evoked rising smoke.
ELIE SAAB
Elie Saab took his itinerant couture inspiration to Barcelona this season.
The famed Modernist architecture of Antoni Gaudi — and its organic lines — were the focus of many of the Lebanese designer’s gowns. Oversize rounded shoulders were a new silhouette variation on the house’s bread-and-butter cinched waist looks.
The industrious Saab couture atelier had got to work to weave the signature crystals, sequins and pearls together to — as the programme notes put it — depict “the sinuosity of organic forms.” The swirling stone reliefs of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs venue, inside the Louvre palace, accentuated the clothes’ architectural lines.