Haute Couture Covers Vast Waters

PARIS The women’s Maria Grazia Chiuris celebration for Christian Dior most often revolves around the work of female artists where her inspiration is certainly more abstract, but the couture collection she showed Monday is rooted in real life entertainer, activist and black icon Josephine Baker and it’s only going from strength to strength. therefore. Chiuri’s starting point is a collection of old photographs of Baker performing in New York in the 1950s, wearing Dior, but the designer pulls the narrative thread back to the 1920s, when Baker first arrived in Paris and created a sensation at Revue Ngre and, later, Folies Bergre. Sleek metallic sheaths and crystal-fringed flapper dresses evoke the Jazz Age, undergarments draped in velvet capes suggest casual wear for backstage dressing rooms. A pair of remarkably simple columnar evening gowns in shimmering satin and crushed velvet that were taut and decadent, all ruffled, lived in the singular highlight of the cabaret star.

Most of his collection consisted of everyday wear: suits, coats, dresses, some of the men’s fabrics that Monsieur Dior liked. The length is a modest mid-calf length, which lends a vintage feel to the hair, makeup, and footwear (an embroidered velvet boot with a cool mid-heel). But it’s a pretty fun effect. Chiuri said she was drawn to Baker because she understood the power of clothing to confront racial stereotypes, and confound gender role expectations, like another famous Dior customer, Marlene Dietrich. The ladies resonate with him, so much so that Chiuri chose a tuxedo coat as a personal favorite from her new collection. (Baker and Dietrich do almost as much for men’s tuxedos as Fred Astaire and Cary Grant.) It’s just the way I like it for myself, so clean and timeless, he adds. And perhaps it’s that intimate, personal resonance that makes this collection feel ethereal. It has soul.

Of course, it’s also a Christian Dior show so it demands incredible contextualization. American artist Mickalene Thomas created 13 photo-based collages in her signature style, celebrating Baker and a dozen other black women who have blazed a trail in their world, among them Dorothy Dandridge in film, Nina Simone and Lena Horne in music, Donyale Luna in modeling. They are reproduced in giant embroidered wall pieces executed by Chanakya Craft School in Mumbai. Great women and female artists don’t celebrate themselves enough, Chiuri said emphatically. I am obsessed with pushing women. As always, I was left wondering where this incredible piece of contemporary art would end up when the music stopped.

There was more contemporary art at Chanel’s show on Tuesday morning in the form of cardboard, wood and paper animal sculptures by Xavier Veilhan to accompany show designer Virginie Viard envisioned as a spontaneous country party. Midsummeror Woven Man, possible? There’s something of a cult classic in a giant abstract creature thrust into a grotesque shadow show space. There’s a model hidden inside, a bit Tap Spine perhaps, it became even more emphatic when an elephant staggered across the stage at the end of the performance. From this gigantic edifice rises Anna Ewers, a veiled virgin bride embroidered with a swallow.

It’s clunky and kultish, like a cross between a Trojan horse and a child horse, and in a strange way, it’s the perfect distillation of the collection itself. As much as it embodies haute couture in the extraordinary technique that creates the garment, it also ensures that it has a glistening, frothy fairy-tale naivety that seems grotesque at odds with couture’s expression of fundamentally grown-up sophistication. The same artistic sophistication, in fact, that shaped the original bestiary in Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment on Rue Cambon, the Coco zone that Viard introduced to Veilhan at the start of their collaboration.

So back to clothes. Viard likes the idea of ​​a majorette, the kind who might lead a small-town Americana parade in a flared skirt or shorts, lace-up boots, maybe even a shortened swing coat. There were tall hats and bow ties, as if the models were ringmasters in a circus of abstract animals awkwardly filling the arena. When that hat and tie combo accompanied the black group’s tiered transparent formalities towards the end of the show, it took on the Girls-of-Guns n Roses lead. I’ve always maintained that the heart of rock girl Virginie Viard will ultimately define her tenure at Chanel. This is the whisper of the future. Mind you, she covered her base by pinning a pearl-selected Corgi on a classic Chanel tweed. Playing to the Palace, maybe?

Ultimately, with houses the size of Dior and Chanel, designers are bound by their ability to sell on the street. If they do that, haute couture is left to a sheer Everest specialty. The invite to Giorgio Armani’s new Priv show features a harlequin diamond pattern, which sparks fear and curiosity at the same time. Those fears were immediately realized upon entering the venue at the Garde Republicaine, where the horses of the French cavalry usually pranced. Harlequin catwalks! So immediately echoed in the diamond-printed looks it brought to the catwalk.

But then that fear was co-opted by curiosity. Armani never takes half measures. If she likes harlequins, she is all over harlequins. So what does that mean? The Harlequin House is in the grand Italian tradition art comedy with its origins in the Venetian carnival. The Armanis palette of juicy blues and greens, shot with winter sunrise pinks is the palette of Venice at this particular time of year. The sinuous stream of a floor-length veil of glistening duplicates the effect of light on the water.

But there’s also something fundamentally unreal about Armani’s presentation that makes me think about what harlequins meant to Picasso and DeChirico and their associates: romantic, prankster. Giorgio clearly still has a few tricks up his sleeve.