Paris Fashion Week Eschews a World at War

On March 2, as French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech on the country’s nuclear deterrence and acknowledging the geopolitical moment, the crowd at Paris Fashion Week, myself included, started to gather for nine days of runway shows. Two days later, at Nicolas Di Felice’s fifth anniversary show for Courrèges, the finale consisted of a handful of models wearing white-out recreations of select looks in the show. It seemed like Di Felice was sending a message. Could this have been a fashion white flag?

“No, I would never…” Di Felice started backstage while addressing reporters, pausing to consider his words. “It’s more personal, what I do,” he continued. “I would never allow myself to say this about my work,” to conflate it with something as delicate as nuclear weaponry, he must have meant, or perhaps that he does not want to give himself the license to make a statement. “I mean I’m making fashion, it’s a business,” Di Felice said. Di Felice admits that he thinks about culture, art, and the state of the world in his off hours, but not while making clothes to put in a store.

I commend Di Felice for his self-awareness about his station as a luxury fashion designer, and for his honesty. It’s not to say that designers and fashion at large, including the media, should not or cannot address the moment, it’s that it would take more than a handful of white dresses, sexy ones at that, to get there. Instead, what Di Felice was more broadly after was pragmatism. He fashioned his runway as a Parisian street and sent out alarm clocks as this season’s invitation. He said he wanted to depict the full breadth of a Parisian’s day. “It also gave me an excuse to show a bigger range,” he said.

And he did. Di Felice makes very sexy clothes, but at times the bareness crosses the line between aspirationally hot and inconceivably bare. This season some of his best looks were those that were a little more covered up—a very tall, stiff collar on a bomber jacket had a mysterious and intrinsic sense of sex appeal to it. Those in his orbit enjoy his taste in music—he throws an excellent party with an even better DJ lineup—and wear his clothes well. Those outside of it appreciate the singularity of his collections—minimal, revealing, sharp—but have not yet become disciples. I have a feeling that will soon change.

At Tom Ford, Haider Ackermann explored a similar expression of the street at Paris Fashion Week, but his was charged with an overt kind of sensuality that made some in the audience blush. A model wearing a satin dress vest sans shirt and a pair of trousers with the waistband askew and held by a singular patent leather belt strap—a throwback to Tom Ford’s time at Gucci—walked past another in a smoking robe. He turned and held his gaze, she did too. It was like watching the beginning of a torrid affair, or a great one night stand.

Ackermann has toyed with this kind of movement and interaction on the runway during his time at Tom Ford—this was only his third season in—but never this successfully, and never this realistically. A trio of men in colorful dress shirts, cuffs pulled up and turned over, blazers in hand, walked one after the other—if only Wall Street would look that good. Men’s jeans were stiff and creased and t-shirts fit close to the body and hugged the biceps but did not squeeze them. Women walked in sparkly suits wearing one leather glove and holding the other, mid-action; others wore PVC trenchcoats and skirts. I saw a Tom Ford lipstick in one of the see-through pockets, and a friend said he saw a cock ring.

If our respite in times of collective anxiety is to seek connection, and therefore intimacy, with each other, then Ackermann has the right idea by proposing we do so both elegantly and unabashedly. His was a fully realized proposal, from clothes to show to casting, something that’s become increasingly rare in fashion today.

Sex has been top of mind at the collections this season. Whether it is about having it and looking for it—Courrèges, Tom Ford; or fantasizing about it (or looking at it, perhaps even on a screen): Demna’s Gucci, Saint Laurent by Antony Vaccarello, and even Chloé by Chemena Kamali.

Vaccarello has carved out a unique space in fashion over the past five years. His collections have shifted to focus granularly on a singular idea, sometimes two. There was a time in which fashion designers would do just that, provide direction by way of a singularly new silhouette (slinky jeans! A peplum!). They’ve moved on to focus on worldbuilding, general aesthetics rather than specific styles. Vaccarello is the lone designer in Paris working in this old school way.

This season he was all about lace, sometimes as-is or covered in silicone—a blouse, a pencil skirt, a mini dress. Plus, a black suit and a fur jacket (sometimes over the former, at times flying solo with a pair of stilettos). It was striking and convincing. Aspirational, even, when placed against the backdrop of the shimmering Eiffel Tower at night. Vaccarello knows sexy, his Saint Laurent woman is the kind that lives and breathes it, and employs it to her advantage. There was an air of fetish emanating from this collection, a sense of danger. One can appreciate Vaccarello’s focus at a time in fashion in which most designers put everything but the kitchen sink on the runway, simply to see what sticks. If only his silhouette wasn’t so reliant on thinness on the runway, too.

If Saint Laurent spoke to the decadent side of desire, of the way in which fashion, and the wealthy, close their gilded gates in times of communal distress. Then Chemena Kamali of Chloé, who was once Vaccarello’s deputy at Saint Laurent, was aiming for the opposite, looking for empathy and humanity, she said, by way of folklore. She made sheer dresses that weren’t sexy or beguiling, but rather set forth a sense of warmth. It was Kamali’s best-rounded outing since she joined, even if she stuck a bit too closely to a singular silhouette.

“This sense of humanity, community spirit, and empathy feels essential right now,” Kamali wrote in her collection notes. What she meant by right now, exactly, is not clear, but one feels encouraged to read between the lines.

Junya Watanabe was more forthcoming, without saying a thing. He titled his outstanding collection The Art of Assemblage, which had been put together with ready-made materials—a pair of gloves, a phone case, some stuffed animals—in a manner “free from conventional notions of dressmaking,” as this season’s collection notes wrote.

Models swayed to the “Libertango,” a 1974 composition by Astor Piazzola whose title is a portmanteau of “libertad” (freedom) and “tango.” One of them wore a dress with what looked like a clipping of a poster placed diagonally across her dress like a Miss Universe sash. “Que a Paz Prevaleça no Mundo,” it read. “May peace prevail in the world.”