The chill of it all
‘Aren’t you cold?” Catherine Deneuve enquired of a hot-pantswearing Charlotte Gainsbourg at the Saint Laurent show in Paris last week.
Don’t you love the acid putdown wrapped in a show of motherly solicitude?
A colleague and I felt much the same about a Chinese influencer queuing in front of us in the rain outside the Louis Vuitton show a few days later. She was wearing a black Kleenex – just the one layer – and nuzzling her not-particularly-forthcoming boyfriend, the way a cat schmoozes its human at feeding time.
In case you were wondering, the French capital has been as cold and damp as the rest of northern Europe. Everyone in their right mind has been swaddled in coats, sometimes more than one simultaneously (it’s a look, even on the catwalks) and boots or those bulbous white Balenciaga trainers.
But in the same way that actresses are required to saunter along a red carpet in January as if it were August in Mykonos (when will they call #Timesup on that?), some “influencers” still feel they’re expected to disregard all weather conditions other than sweltering.
It used to be the same among fashion journalists: the invocation to display tanned, glossy bare legs in the depths of winter was strong, emanating, or so it was rumoured, from Anna Wintour herself. Tights and knee boots were for fashion wimps and for a few seasons everyone shivered, wore strappy sandals, dangled their coats halfway off their shoulders… None of it made any sense, least of all for an industry whose job, you might think, was to promote the wearing of as many clothes as possible.
These days, weatherappropriate dressing is considered part of the fashion curriculum. Even Kate Moss donned a pair of black tights when she dropped into the Saint Laurent show last week.
If anything, there was a degree of melodramatic overdressing the past few weeks – not just the wearing of multiple coats, but thighhigh boots, hoods, capes, elaborately chunky turtlenecks, duvet coats and cloaks. If all the balaclavas on the catwalks this past month catch on, next winter could look even more snowpocalyptic. Then Charlotte can turn to a gently glowing Catherine and say, “Aren’t you hot in that?”