Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood
There are fashion shows and then there are Fashion Shows. Outside the Nouvelle Eve cabaret, the clamoring crowd clearly expected the latter, rubbernecking and jostling fiercely to get a glimpse of the likes of Paris Jackson filtering into the matinée event — the Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood runway.
Inside, the bustle barely subsided as the guests took their seats, and promptly kicked off again once the models, including the Hadid sisters, appeared onstage. “You’re lucky you didn’t come backstage, it was hell — a labyrinth,” Kronthaler later said over the phone, as getting to him post-show proved impossible.
A show it was. In the collection notes, Kronthaler wrote he wanted to make an elegant tribute to the world of theater.
Out came very Westwood characters inspired by religious icons — the Virgin
Mary or Saint Sara, patron of the Romani traveler communities — or “The Golden Coach,” a 1950s Jean Renoir film that had long been on his must-see list and that he ended up seeing over the holiday period, all voluminous layers of skirts, de rigueur draped gowns and tinsel adornments.
But ultimately, this season was about him. Kronthaler said he’d found himself in one of those life junctures, at a moment where his favorite work partner, Dame Viv, got very busy with her own projects.
“I’d always done things with her in mind, or perhaps supermodels in the past. It put me in a slight crisis and then I realized that no, you have to find the muse in yourself, which means that you have to find it within and be very, very true first of all to yourself,” he said.
So he explored the things he is passionate about in his design, like tailoring. He had fun experimenting with “something a little different instead of Savile Row.” Jackets had “the sentiment of a man’s shoulder,” for instance, he commented. These marked but not exaggerated revisits worked as well on tracksuits given a Westwood blowsiness and ruché effects on the back as they did on the impeccable cut of a long Crombie-style coat and terrific blazers. These anchored the season into something believable — a wardrobe for those who are the main characters of their own lives. True to him, and to the world of Westwood, too.