Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Coronavirus hogs the catwalk
Paris Fashion Week begins with anxiety
“WERE you in Milan?”
The question was once so innocent. It was a casual conversation starter between editors, stylists and retailers as they arrived here for the final stop on an international fashion show circuit that included New York, London and then – maybe, just maybe – Milan, before they settled into their seat at Christian Dior, the esteemed French fashion house that unofficially signals the start of the ready-to-wear season here.
“Were you in Milan?” That used to be a shorthand way of asking about runway trends, about whether designer Miuccia Prada still had the creative chops to leave an audience rapturously discombobulated.
What was once a question steeped in possibility and optimism, however, is now one drenched in anxiety about the coronavirus, cases of which have spiked in small towns surrounding Milan in northern Italy and have been spreading southward. There have been 374 confirmed cases and 12 deaths, as of Wednesday.
“Were you in Milan, where arriving travellers were greeted with uniformed officials monitoring people for signs of fever?” “Were you in Milan, where people were itching to leave?” “Were you in Milan, when everything turned dark and surreal?”
Now guests sit shoulder-to-shoulder at fashion shows from morning to evening. And more than ever, there is a sense these communal gatherings of aesthetic prognostications are little more than petri dishes of incubating germs rather than ideas.
No one has cancelled a show here – not like in Milan, where Giorgio Armani decided to live-stream his runway show from an empty theatre as a safety precaution.
Some retailers cancelled their Milan trip and headed directly to Paris, where they will buy the collections in the affected brands’ showrooms here instead.
At Dior, designer Maria Grazia Chiuri’s show notes opened with an acknowledgment of the realities of our interconnected economy:
“All our thoughts are with our teams, clients, friends and partners in Asia, Italy and around the world.”
At the entrance to the Dries Van Noten show on Wednesday at the Opéra Bastille, ushers handed out face masks. Large pump bottles of hand-sanitiser were stationed just beyond the metal detectors, which now greet guests at every show.
Meanwhile, the shows go on. The anxiety simmers. There is no light. People obsessively scrub their hands with Purell. They are not so keen on the double-buss greetings when a smile at arm’s distance will do. But still, they kiss. They take selfies. They step-and-repeat.
There is no light. Every time a bit of blue sky dares to brighten the day, the clouds roll in and the wind whips up and rain pours sideways across the stalled traffic.
At 2.30pm on Tuesday, guests arrived at the Dior show: a giant box constructed in the Tuileries Gardens. Darkness greeted the celebrities: Carla Bruni, Sigourney Weaver, Andie MacDowell.
Neon words flashed feminist incantations and provocations from the rafters. The words flickered in red, orange and green.
Women are the moon that moves the tides. The words held steady in bright blue lights. We are all clitoridian women. The words leered in brazen pink. But this was not light. This was heavy, burdensome, dense. The fighting, the resisting, never ends.
Dior was exhausting even before Chiuri sent out some 100 models in a parade of plaid, fringe, underwear and branded shopping bags.
Chiuri is a feminist. It is impossible to tell a story about her design aesthetic without mentioning this fact.
From her debut collection as the first female creative director at Dior, she has used her position to elevate the philosophical writings of women who have dissected the patriarchy.
But Chiuri doesn’t allow her clothes to speak to the subject matter that has so captured her intellectual curiosity. We are in the thick of a new chapter in feminism. The Harvey Weinstein guilty verdicts, while not a perfect victory, shifted the tone of the entire conversation surrounding sexual assault.
The disappointment is Chiuri herself was silent. |