Does fashion make the people come together? For a business knocked for its supposed elitism, it’s a bold question. But in a season when brands have largely had to rely on livestreams, Giorgio Armani opened his arms to the public a little bit wider. The designer and national treasure chose to broadcast his main-line show on the Italian TV network La7 as a gesture—no doubt—of rebooting an industry bruised by the pandemic.

Armani was the first designer to cancel attendance for a fashion show when COVID-19 hit Milan in February 2020. “I suspect, as someone who has lived a life and had a great deal of experience, I have probably developed a sense of when things are genuinely serious and need a response,” the 86-year-old wrote in an email before this evening’s broadcast, which opened with a short film narrated by Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino, revisiting Armani’s all-time most “timeless” moments.

The designer spent lockdown observing a typically regimented daily routine, which he detailed in his email. “I continued to wake up early, do some exercise, have breakfast, read the papers, and then I’d go through some emails,” went just a couple of lines from the complete account, too brilliantly extensive to publish in full. But this was his point: Armani is too much of a veteran to let a pandemic faze him. He has lived through war and built an empire that he is not about to abandon.

This season he gathered the Italian public and his international audiences around something to which they can all relate: Giorgio Armani—the longest-working designer in fashion—and the women and men who wear him. Expressing a message of timelessness central to a moment in which ideas about investment pieces and style consistency are key, Armani exercised a grayscale tone-on-tone approach to dressing, which felt universal—like a canvas for application.

“She is still concerned with looking good and feeling comfortable and confident,” Armani wrote of his post-lockdown woman. “And if anything, her desire for beauty has been sharpened by the experience of having so much beauty denied to her through having her movement and activities limited. Giorgio Armani has never been about dressing up (or down for that matter) in any conventional sense. Instead it has been, and remains, all about creating a timeless elegance that brings out the character of the wearer. That has not changed.”

On the women’s as well as the men’s side, daywear was soft, casual, crinkled: democratic tailoring, if you will. Voluminous shapes were adorned in chilly coral-like surface decoration, sumptuous and muted all at once. Slouchy pajama-like silhouettes evoked the comfort-wear adopted from quarantine. For evening, suits were sharpened and sculpted. Languid dresses looked mercurial, an effect echoed in outfits of separates in textures silky, shiny, and shimmery. It was style over fashion. And maybe it was all the silk and slo-mo, but it was somehow incredibly zen.

Now, Armani wrote, “I simply and sincerely hope that we will learn from this experience and that we will use it as an opportunity to rethink and reset. Where the industry is concerned, in my opinion, we have been due for a reckoning for a while now. Concerns like waste, the environment, too much product of poor quality, a marketing-driven approach that can lead to a disconnection with what the consumer really wants…” he paused. “I hope that fashion will now review its priorities, learning from this experience.”

“She is still concerned with looking good and feeling comfortable and confident,” Armani wrote of his post-lockdown woman.

Maison Margiela have released a masterful film presentation of their Spring 2021 Co-ed collection. Creative director John Galliano worked with mastermind image-maker Nick Knight to create the many-layered film, which is part making-of documentary and part undefinably artistic fashion presentation.

The film begins with a straightforward documentary style, depicting a video call between Galliano and Knight in which the former explains the genesis and production of the collection. Galliano’s excitement and pride are apparent as he discusses the initial process of redeveloping house codes and hunting for inspiration in secondhand shops. But his main point of inspiration for the collection, and the one from which Knight’s visual storytelling beautifully stems, was his experience of Buenos Aires’ underground tango scene.

Amazed by this encounter, Galliano imagined the story which forms the other half of the film. An old man recounts his experience with tango growing up in a recently industrialized Argentine village: the expectations of his arranged marriage are disrupted when his fiancée’s cousins – a sinisterly alluring pair of twins – arrive in the town and initiate a tango frenzy. The film’s narrative does at times lean into the fashion industry’s unfortunately popular trope of fetishizing and glamorizing poverty. The platitudinous line “people in our village were poor, but we could dance,” feels especially emblematic of this, and rather unsavory in a work that exists to sell expensive products to the world’s more affluent.

Nevertheless, this narrative is included to give an emotional content to Galliano’s designs and Nick Knight’s exquisite visuals, and this it does perfectly. The setting is a black stage covered in a shallow pool of water, where a single stark spotlight shines as if cast by the moon. The remarkable sense of depth created by this space feels perfect for the emotive choreography of the dancers who occupy it. An incredible combination of tango and contemporary dance, it feels deeply romantic and tragic. With their roots in tango dressing and their color scheme of black, white, and red, Galliano’s designs feel like excellent theatrical costuming for this performance. Knight augments the artistic elevation of it all with cinematic vignettes and expressionistic camera effects like color inversion.

These narrative and dance scenes are woven between footage and detailed description of the production process behind the collection. It is fascinating to see both people and machines at work in crafting these gorgeous pieces, especially when we hear Galliano discuss how his team conceives of the ready-to-wear collection as an industrialized extension of couture. Knight is wise enough to recognize that pulling back the curtain in fashion is more than capturing a designer rendering sketches and going through swatches of fabric. His narrative is multifaceted as we withness the 360º of the make; cuttings, tailoring, fabrication creation, silk screening, draping, hand stitching, fittings, hair and makeup meetings, choreography, styling, and more. Overlayed onscreen in kinetic motion are the names of the talents involved from Olivier Rizzo to Pat McGrath to Margiela seamstresses and shopkeeps. The enterprise of fashion creation is showcased in it’s entirety and while the viewer is drawing into the narrative surround the elderly tango artist, another set of artistry is on full display educating the viewers about the house and its processes.

Covering everything from the make of footwear to deconstructed tailoring, we also get to witness the development of Maison Margiela’s Recicla pieces, which are composed from combinations of upcycled vintage garments, is also very exciting.

But the unsung heroes of the film are its editing and sound design teams. The documentary and choreography sections could feel like completely different films, yet the editors manage to weave them together into a single creative journey. Brilliant cinematography captures the energy and precision of the construction process.

The sound design and music does incredible work in this process: the mechanical sounds of production are rhapsodically transformed into music, while the tango sections are given, of course, a beautiful and dramatic tango soundtrack. The moment these two pieces of music come together feels like a revelation.

The film is boldly ambitious in its dualistic approach to presenting the collection, and lesser creative teams may have buckled under its weight. Yet through the brilliant work of an excellent creative team, it comes together as a literal and figurative showcase of a designer’s narrative and vision. It may be the best documentary of a collection creation ever.

The Journey Of A Collection From Dream To Reality Was On Full Display In A Documentary Wrapped In The Form Of A Fantasy.

DID MAISON MARGIELA & NICK KNIGHT JUST CREATE FASHION’S GREATEST DOCUMENTARY?

As far as fashion months go, it’s been a major few weeks for runway star-in-the-making Lila Grace Moss. Just days after celebrating her 18th birthday, the daughter of Kate Moss and Dazed magazine co-founder Jefferson Hack made a blockbuster debut on Miu Miu’s SS21 catwalk. The show, which was broadcast from Milan on October 6, is the exclamation point to end an extraordinary season that’s seen the virtual FROW become something of a new normal.

From the lifestyle changes she’s making for the health of the planet to the TV show that got her and her supermodel mom through lockdown—this is your one-minute meet up with the fashion world’s brightest new star.

You’ve already worked with luminaries including David Bailey, Tim Walker, and David Sims. Which fashion creatives are you excited to collaborate with next?

I’d love to work with Gray Sorrenti and Edward Enninful.

When it comes to your own closet, which three items of clothing do you wear on repeat?

Flared jeans, a cozy jumper, and Nike Air Jordans.

If you had to pick one investment piece for autumn, what would it be?

I take my Marc Jacobs O!Mega coconut bronzer everywhere.

Who do you follow for beauty inspiration?

What’s the best tip for taking care of your skin?

Me and my mom watched [the Michael Jordan basketball documentary] The Last Dance together— we couldn’t turn it off.

Do you have a secret for getting a good night’s sleep?

Our world is undergoing enormous transformations. What three lifestyle changes have you made this year for the benefit of the planet?

Cutting down on eating meat, supporting sustainable brands, and avoiding single-use plastic wherever possible.

Is there a cause close to your heart that we can also support?

Project Zero does an amazing job of protecting our oceans.

If we could teleport you to any restaurant in the world for a celebratory post-show dinner, where would that be? And what would you order?

An amazing Japanese restaurant in Malaga [Spain] called Ta-Kumi, and I’d order everything!

KATE MOSS’S DAUGHTER LILA GRACE MAKES HER FASHION WEEK DEBUT AT MIU MIU

This season Owens showed outside of Paris for the first time in forever. It was a presentation that was “reductive,” as he put it, in at least two senses. His “skeleton” crew of around 20 colleagues and 20-ish models showed a livestreamed collection in part as pragmatic negotiation with life in the times of coronavirus: “It feels like we are able to orchestrate something with fewer instruments.”

As he said in an outtake of the filmed interview: “There is a reclusiveness, an isolation that I’ve found here that appeals to me. The beach never becomes crowded. I’ve had the same cabana for the past 10 years…and I go every morning with my coffee and I have my computer and I just work there all day. I jump in the sea and then I work and then I jump the sea.… And that’s my summer. And in recent circumstances I’ve stayed here even more: Paris has been a little bit difficult. And I decided to really buckle down and stay in Italy and kind of focus and be with the factory more…the minute the factory was able to reopen, I came right away.”That factory is in Concordia, Modena, around a three-hour drive from here—and where Owens also has an apartment (plus an Owenscorp cafeteria) to base himself in during periods of sustained focus on production. For this show, though, Owens had his team make the short hop back to the Lido to present his collection against the rationalist architecture of its Palazzo del Casinò. Aesthetically, this building’s facade is a Venetian cousin of the Palais de Tokyo, Owens’s usual Parisian venue (which was this season snapped up in his absence by Chloé). Unlike the Palais de Tokyo, the Casinò, a little like Owens himself, is a structure whose monumentally imposing exterior—“graphic severity,” as he puts it—belies an interior marked by humor and abundance: “I didn’t realize it was going to be so extravagant. There’s murals and there’s crazy Murano chandeliers, and the proportions are extreme…”

All of the fittings and last-minute prep work took place about 100 meters down the road, in the Hotel Excelsior. This is where Owens first stayed when he became a regular here. Even now, settled as he is in his nearby apartment, he maintains that Excelsior-operated cabana (which is one among hundreds being dismantled along the beach to mark the very end of summer). Built in 1908, the Excelsior is a Moorish fantasy whose starting point was the true Venetian articulations of that Arabian style, including most famously of all the Doge’s Palace: This more-ish update was built as a Disney-fied pleasure palace for the sybarites of the early 20th century. “Its legend has always captivated me,” said Owens, who cited Nijinsky dancing on the beach here as one favorite point of reference. Today both the Lido and the Excelsior are famed for playing host to the Venice Film Festival, but outside of season and festival time the hotel and its surroundings are quiet. The beachside restaurant where Owens flexes his Italian is the only one open, and only remains so because he asked its owners to keep his team in victuals during the run-up to the show.

Reference-wise, the Lido is probably best known for its key role in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. “It always struck a chord with me,” said Owens, who added that the book (and film) “is one of the reasons that I moved to the Lido.” Owens added: “Here’s this ascetic creator who retreats to the Lido because he’s got writer’s block. He sees a youth and he is inspired and euphoric. And then gradually, that turns into some kind of obsession…. But I think the part that resonates with me is the part about aging, and that’s a big part of the storyline. [He’s] recognizing a moment in this youth that he misses, that he misses deeply and profoundly, and maybe which he never even experienced. And he’s seeing that this golden moment is out of reach, and that he’ll never ever experience or capture it, and it turns into a degrading experience. So you have this full arc of euphoria and inspiration and stimulation that gradually corrupts until it becomes this torture.”

Parts of the beach—the beach where Mann’s Aschenbach fulfills the novel’s title—seem to be constituted entirely of dead shells. They crunch underfoot. The water is flat and limpid, and there is no visible line of horizon where it meets the sky. The air is salty, even a little dank, and seagulls bicker as diggers trundle up and down dismantling cabanas. In Death in Venice Mann describes “the limbo between creation and decay,” and his description of why Aschenbach is so drawn to this place could as easily be projected onto Owens. As Mann puts it: “His love of the sea had profound roots: the hardworking artist’s desire to rest, his longing to get away from the demanding diversity of phenomena and take shelter in the bosom of simplicity and immensity; a forbidden penchant that was entirely antithetical to his mission and, for that very reason, seductive—a proclivity for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal: for nothingness.”

Of nothingness, Owens observed: “I’m not one of the pessimists who thinks that we’re going to destroy the planet. I feel like it’s going to evolve into something else, and I think it would be arrogant of us to think that we have that power…I think death is part of all of our lives and everything needs to evolve into something else. Anyway, that’s my fatalistic attitude.”

The show started five minutes after its advertised start time. The models each had two changes, which saw them becoming gradually more clothed: There is no way that Owens’s “wader” boots, platformed thigh-highs presented as a coping mechanism for the Phlegethon (river to hell) after which the collection is named, can be changed mid-livestream. Michèle Lamy watched on as Tyrone Dylan Susman and the rest of this pared-down team worked through the rack, replenishing the looks as the models returned from their fierce circuits of the piazza. Behind the rope, that straggle of spectators included an elderly couple in pastel puffa jackets, with a poodle: Owens later said they are his downstairs neighbors. Lights pulsed from inside the palace. A drone moaned above. Judd’s mix built and built to the crescendo it would never reach.

“During quarantine,” said Owens: “I noticed that speaking to a lot of friends, a lot of relationships had evolved. Our relationships with loved ones deepened, and relationships that were inessential kind of fell away. Everybody was able to have a minute to define what was most important to them, which was maybe a silver lining to that cloud.”

“Italy Is Where I Create, and Paris Is Where I Am Judged”

Things that aren’t what they seem are the norm at MM6. A jumpsuit is actually two pairs of pants, conjoined at the waist, the upper pair flipped up over the shoulders. A white dress is the brand’s signature chair cover in white muslin transposed seam for seam as a bib dress. A necklace is a giant, blown-up ring. Nearly every single item contains some kind of clever trick.

Even months of working apart over Zoom couldn’t diminish the MM6 mentality. Perhaps the distance only enhanced it. Eschewing print and color—too hard to see clearly over Zoom, a brand representative said—in favor of standard white, black, beige, and denim, the design team was left to focus on form and function. Playfulness abounds. On a legible level are the hybridized and deconstructed garments: a silk maxiskirt meant to look like a folded-down slip, a trench sliced at the waist into a skirt and jacket, the ultimate shoe pants in thigh highs that mimic the leg of a jean over an ankle boot. Then, there is the delightfully bizarre: tripartite slit leather shoes that can be worn a myriad of ways, from shoe to slipper to sandal. Amid a season of at-home mailers, MM6’s is the strangest: a metal can and string. The list of imaginative uses for it is the size of a poster.

The question is: All this weirdness to what end? Martin Margiela, the brand’s enigmatic founder, could speak directly to his moment with his subversion. What does a bifurcated MM6 studio robe say about the now? That we miss the uniformity and community of office life? (The brand’s video certainly enforces that reading.) The most compelling pieces here are not the trickiest, but the simplest. A pinstripe gray suit with cropped sleeves and wide-leg trousers is hard to resist, a piece that invites the wearer to make it weird in their own way.

Adi Gil, Ange Donhauser, and Gabi Asfour began making masks early in the pandemic. Upcycled from leftover fabric from their spring 2012 collection InSalaam, InShalom, which blended patterns from the Arabic and Jewish cultures, they were masks with a message. “Under not the most pleasant circumstances, humanity has unified,” Asfour said over a Zoom call from their New Jersey studio.

If that’s an optimistic way of looking at the pandemic, the mask-making project did energize them. “We feel good about our place,” Gil elaborated. “The mask success is nice proof that we do make sense in this time.” The Threeasfour trio have been at it for two decades, but they remain avant-garde outsiders in New York fashion, showing only irregularly on the Fashion Week calendar. After skipping last season—the last time we saw them on the runway was a year ago, when they were celebrating their 20th anniversary—they produced a spring 2021 collection that balances their artistic, experimental tendencies with more wearable ones.

Their sculptural collections are often inspired by sacred geometry. It’s a topic linking geometry with nature and God, that has come up more than once this season, probably because it feels like Gaia has decided it’s time to fight back. Their most recent collection was an ode to the plant world. On Zoom today they riffed about Vesica Piscis. The almond shape made by the intersection of two circles is also called the Womb of All Creation and the Eye of Horus, and it symbolizes protection, power, and good health. “For our new type of reality it’s the perfect theme,” Asfour said.

That almond shape took three-dimensional form on the more artistic, experimental looks in the new collection—conversation starters, all of them—and transformed into Op Art prints on easy-to-wear tunics and leggings made in collaboration with the Japanese digital printing company Mimaki. The digital prints also have the distinction of looking uniquely their own.

Their sculptural collections are often inspired by sacred geometry.

The pause provided by 2020’s COVID-19 stay-in-place orders led many designers to rethink how they’ve been doing business, but for Christopher John Rogers, all the hours spent indoors allowed him a moment to appreciate what’s been working. Since launching his brand in 2016, Rogers and his team have been working nonstop, moving quickly from inspiration to execution. The breakneck pace did little to impede their success—he’s fresh off a 2019 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund win—but Rogers appreciated the chance to reflect. “In the past, there wasn’t time to think about why we’re doing the things we’re doing,” he shared via Zoom. “Part of the reason why the collections have been so well-received is that they’ve been quite visceral in terms of the way they were conceived. [Our team] has been like, ‘This feels exciting, we enjoy this’ instead of investigating why. This time it has been nice to parse through the reasons I’m attracted to certain things and how that can serve where we want to take the brand.”

The direction Rogers settled on focuses on joy and simplicity. After the bombast of his fall collection, Rogers stripped things down, designing not just for the A-list celebrities who’ve been drawn into his sphere, but the everyday people looking for a luxury mood booster. Color and embellishment were used to elevate closet staples into something that feels fantastical. A button-down shirt was upgraded with rainbow crystals, while white suiting received vibrant topstitching on cuffs and lapels. Away from the studio and unable to do some of the draping he’s become known for, Rogers took things old school and pulled out the Crayolas. “I was away for four months and couldn’t do anything physical with my hands, so I just bought crayons and color pencils and started scribbling like I was a kid,” says Rogers, who has a background in fine arts. “I wasn’t trying to create anything specific; I just wanted to have fun and express myself. It’s about getting back to the way children see the world through very simple shapes. They put energy on the page when they draw, so this was about simplifying and translating that energy into the clothes.”

Tapping into the vitality of naive art doesn’t mean making clothes that feel juvenile. Rogers struck a balance between the more whimsical elements of the collection and the glitz that has put him on the speed dial of Hollywood’s top stylists. Having mastered voluminous ball gowns, he gave slinkier fare a try with a sequin catsuit for body-conscious clients. The silks and satins were replaced with easier to wear cotton and taffeta fabrics, but the aesthetic shifts were slight. The Lady Gagas and Tracee Ellis Rosses of the world can breathe a sigh of relief; Rogers’s girl is still a glamour puss, but this time around, she’s also an everywoman. “It’s nice to know that all these different types of people with differing interests, body types, and personalities can find themselves within this aesthetic,” explains Rogers. “Ultimately, that’s the point.”

“It’s nice to know that all these different types of people with differing interests, body types, and personalities can find themselves within this aesthetic,” explains Rogers. “Ultimately, that’s the point.”

CHRISTOPHER JOHN ROGERS SPRING 2021 READY-TO-WEAR

After over two years of extensive renovation, the Palais Galliera Musée de la mode de la ville de Paris reopened last week with an anchor exhibition –Gabrielle Chanel Manifeste de Modethat will run through near the end of March 2021. 

Viard thoughts brought back images of the actresses years ago hanging on the walls of the Palais Galliera not far from the Grand Palais. “Gabrielle Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld dressed so many actresses in films and in real life. I was thinking about them. But without wanting to replicate. Without falling into a vintage citation. I wanted it to be very joyful, colorful and very vibrant too,” Viard said. 

Made for today and for women now, these clothes followed the road map and principles laid out long ago by the house’s founder but they are not enslaved to them. The white blouson with black lapel worn with a black logo high slit skirt and a white bra top, the ecru sleeveless classic jacket and asymmetrical fold skirt, the ecru tweed sleeveless midriff tank paired with a short and a matching loose cardigan as a three pieces suit are the new clothes designed with the fast paced life of women today in mind and the notion of comfort signaled by the current pandemic crisis where more time is spent at home than ever. 

No wonder why the three models in the series of teasers before the show never actually wanted to leave their apartments. These spring clothes merge forms and functions. Even the evening clothes are significantly pared down as the embellishments of the past now float lightly on a black slim collarless jacket with light beading over black chiffon skirt and long cape train that flew behind the model’s back. 

Seeing a new designer at work is always a process that can take a few seasons to sort out the new look and so forth. The slit skirts with the suits or separately looked smoother this time than at the fall 2020 show. And a tighter edit helped to strengthen the show.  

Made for today and for women now, these clothes followed the road map and principles laid out long ago by the house’s founder but they are not enslaved to them.

CHANEL SPRING 2021 FASHION SHOW ATMOSPHERE

Gucci is selling a $2,600 (£1,700) orange tartan dress with a satin bow detail for men to “disrupt the toxic stereotypes that mold masculine gender identity.”

According to the Italian luxury designer’s website, the Tartan cotton long smock shirt, which features a Peter Pan collar, mother of pearl buttons, and “smock embroidery” is inspired by grunge looks from the 90s.

“This tartan smock in delicate colors reflects the idea of fluidity explored for the Fall/Winter 2020 fashion show, disrupting the toxic stereotypes that mold masculine gender identity,” the dress’s description reads. 

"The contrast Peter Pan collar and smock embroidery on the front add a childhood inspired element, which ties to a recurrent theme of the collection.”

On the website, the cotton dress is styled over a pair of light-wash ripped jeans, with the model accessorizing the look with a wool maroon, beige and blue striped hat, a black crossbody purse and grey and pink sneakers.

“Pieces with versatile ways to wear and style embrace each person who is part of the House’s individual spirit,” the description adds.

However, on social media, the dress was met with mostly negative reactions, with many criticizing the garment’s steep price tag.

“£1,700 for arguably the ugliest dress ever?” one person tweeted.

Another said: “The men can buy that dress from any chain of stores for $20 if they really want to frock around. They don’t need Gucci.”

“This seems pointless because anyone can get a better-looking dress for 20 to 30 bucks on Amazon,” someone else wrote.

Others questioned the styling of the dress, and why the luxury brand felt it was necessary to pair it with jeans.

“£1,700 Gucci dress for men. I don't really know what they were trying to do here and I really don't know why my man has jeans on underneath,” one person wrote.

In addition to the pricey short-sleeved dress, the fashion house is also offering a less expensive option in a pink and turquoise floral print.

The Blue Gucci Liberty floral wool long shirt for men retails for $1,800 and also features mother of pearl buttons.

“This long shirt features the ‘Gucci Liberty’ label at the back in honor of the special mash-up. Pieces with versatile ways to wear and style embrace each person who is part of the House’s individual spirit," the description reads.

Like the tartan dress, Gucci also shows this dress styled over ripped jeans. The model’s outfit is completed with a black crossbody bag and a beige alpaca wool blend coat.

Dress features an orange and beige plaid print and mother-of-pearl buttons.

GUCCI IS SELLING A $2,600 TARTAN DRESS FOR MEN TO 'DISRUPT TOXIC STEREOTYPES'

Y’s Black collection looked a little rough around the edges — intentionally so, thanks to the frayed hem details that punctuated several looks — but its vocabulary was refined. Yohji Yamamoto’s creative team played on the label’s signature utilitarian aesthetic and roomy, layered silhouettes with a lineup titled “Truth.” It was indeed true to brand, and got straight to the point. Using natural fabrics such as Cupro, rayon and cotton, the design team succeeded in walking that very fine line between understated and interesting.

Alongside signature asymmetric gabardine pieces in black, fluid trenchcoats and raw indigo denim looks, there was an array of loose-fitting shirtdresses, shifts, one-pieces and pinafores, either plain, dip-dyed or bleached to create unique effects, as in a series in royal blue and black that resembled a cloudy night sky, with each piece unique.

It was indeed true to brand, and got straight to the point. Using natural fabrics such as Cupro, rayon and cotton, the design team succeeded in walking that very fine line between understated and interesting.

“More than an inspiration, it’s a question, the very significant one of gender. We’re going beyond the basic idea that a woman gains power by co-opting the masculine wardrobe. What space is there for a category of clothing between the feminine and masculine? It’s a growing space and its contours are ever more permissible. We’re defining a type of clothing that lives in a non-binary zone. It’s fascinating to consider. What is a non-binary garment?” Nicolas Ghesquière said in a post-show statement after his Spring live Louis Vuitton show at the newly renovated Samaritaine department store, on the top floor of this historical Art Nouveau building facing the river Seine. 

Navigating between the masculine and feminine has been the current currency in fashion’s obsessions with gender fluidity, with so many designers attempting to erase this boundary by making the same clothes for both sexes or adapting one’s sex traditional clothes for another, and so forth. The French designer Jean Paul Gaultier has been working on this paradox of gendered clothing more or less his entire career trying to find commonalities on one hand and erase differences on another hand. His defining Spring 1985 show titled ‘Un garderobe pour deux’ in October 1984 was the first runway show in Paris to propose one set of clothing for both sexes in which males and females wore the same clothes and some hybrids like a skirt-pant combination. 

This season both Thom Browne and John Galliano at Maison Margiela proposed co-ed collections and by co-ed, these designers meant clothes made in the same way for both sexes, not garments made for one or the other that could be worn by both. It is also treacherous territory for fashion that’s easily mined but difficult to execute in a flawless way. Ghesquière showed segments of Wim Wender’s film Wings of Desire, the romantic 1987 movie about immortal angels in Berlin. 

What Ghesquière referred to as co-opting masculine wardrobe for power was perhaps a reference to the designer Yves Saint Laurent’s penchant for taking exclusive men’s wardrobe such as the tuxedo and turning this garment of power into Le smoking in 1966, giving his women an equal status sartorially at a time when such notion of equality of any kind was at best far distant. This Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit for women shattered the image of one particular type of gender garment and did so mainly on the point of the perception and of how people in society viewed clothing.  

Here Ghesquière was not talking about an interchangeable set of garments that men and women can all wear, rather he was asking whether from a design perspective was there a middle ground somewhere or ‘in-between’ as he referred. Clearly, for the seasoned designer, this remained a grey area in the fashion pantheon that he was attempting to address in this spring show where the clothes veered towards the feel and look of 1980’s slouchy and oversized shapes with a strong influence of the late 1990’s streetwear vibes that reminisced the kids in the photographs from documentary photographer Jamel Shabazz. 

The show opened with an ecru thermal long sleeve with the word VOTE printed in yellow paired with multi pleated khaki loose pants and a large leather brown belt, perhaps as a nod to the young people in America and the upcoming election, now less than a month away. From there the show progressed to the oversize trench, coats, a grey sequined cropped jacket suit, and various loose blouson paired with long skirts or loose pleated pants.

“If you take a powerful term like ‘gender-fluid’ and apply it to fashion, it’s really the idea of fluidity in a garment that moves harmoniously from one to the other, and which is one and the other,” Ghesquière said as a way to clarify that fluidity meant clothes that can be both at the same time. However, at times it is difficult to understand what the designer meant as an in-between space between masculinity/femininity boundaries – this notion of hybrid garments or even transitory garments was not entirely clear as expressed in the clothes such as a grey silk satin splash painted single-breasted pleated pantsuit and leather dress shoes that conveyed a clear masculine rather than some level of cross over or in the middle. 

He mentioned the series of loud printed oversized dresses shown towards the end, that can be either dresses or XXXL tee-shirts that skaters wore over their shorts, or as many young urban women wore sports team jerseys as short cocktail dresses. Some of these print dresses or those cropped large short-sleeve printed tee shirts, a look similar to those football players who wore half jerseys at practice, recalled those mixes of impact prints from the Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto in the 1980s. 

The show opened with an ecru thermal long sleeve with the word VOTE printed in yellow paired with multi pleated khaki loose pants and a large leather brown belt, perhaps as a nod to the young people in America and the upcoming election, now less than a month away.

LOUIS VUITTON SPRING 2021 READY-TO-WEAR DETAILS

Looking at any Chanel shows there is always that notion of observing the familiar, that the clothes are often what is already known and recognized – the colors and the fabrics change slightly, the sleeves shortened a bit, the hemlines of the skirts shifted up and down, the shoulder got a special treatment or the waist line got more focus. Why so much has not changed is because the ‘Chanel’ idea remain solid through the decades – in her time, Mlle Gabrielle never wavered to trends.

Her radicalism was this head on steadfast standing guard of her own vision against changes around her and the Galliera exhibition showed this forcefully inside its galleries including the new ground floor. Women today want the same idea of freedom and movement as much as during the twentieth century and perhaps the clothes as well.

The Lagerfeld years at Chanel produced wonderful and magnificent memories and poignant point of views for consumers to feel renewed each time they purchase a Chanel product. But like all memories, fashion memories fade over time and faster now than ever before. The customers have to be reminded again and again of the worth of the brand and what the brand stand for in terms of products and in terms of values. Now, it’s Viard turn to carry the torch forward linking the past to the present and the future. 

And this process of simplification is most noticeable on the clothes that Viard sent out especially today where the new tweeds suit were as light and soft and even oversized for added comfort as in the opening double breast jacket with slouchy shoulder paired with a knee length skirt with a slit on the right side of the legs. The luxury quotient of these suits is in the details: the embroidered trims, the buttons, and the complex new tweed fabrics that looked soft and hefty at the same time. 

The prevailing silhouettes are clean, relaxed and mostly linear with grey tweed floor length dress, light pink cardigan with black trim pattern resembling a jacket paired with print charcoal pleated pants, pink embroidered silk dress with black chiffon cape and underskirt, an ecru sport jacket and knee length short, or a white or black crepe deep v-neck floor length vest with black silk trims paired with pocket pants.  

The luxury quotient of these suits is in the details: the embroidered trims, the buttons, and the complex new tweed fabrics that looked soft and hefty at the same time. 

When the clock struck midnight on January 1, ushering in not only a new year but a new decade, there was little reason to believe that 2020 wouldn’t be forward-looking. Ten months later we find ourselves living in a present that is informed, and sometimes haunted, by the past. It’s a time of reckoning and a time of reconnection.

It’s also a time to stay small and local while thinking big, which has always been XulyBët founder Lamine Badian Kouyaté’s way. Building on his African heritage, the designer works responsibly, collaging and patchworking existing garments and materials into new designs.

The phrase “it takes a village” came to mind while listening to Kouyaté and XulyBët CEO Rodrigo Martinez describe how their spring 2021 came together with the help of friends old and new. Honey Dijon, who did the music, belongs to the latter category; Michaela Angela Davis, the former. Kouyaté knows the activist poet from his days in New York when Davis was writing for Vibe magazine. He asked her to write a poem this season, and her recitation of that work, “Fire This Time,” played in the show venue (you can listen to it here, as well). Kouyaté dedicated this show to Amy Spindler, the late New York Times fashion critic, who donated her XulyBët collection to the Costume Institute, to which the designer has recently sent a piece for exhibition.

The Chanel show set, in Paris’s soaring Grand Palais, spelled the brand’s name in giant letters, evoking the iconic HOLLYWOOD sign in the Santa Monica mountains.

Did this suggest that creative director Virginie Viard was thinking of the movies? “Less movies than actresses,” Viard explained, and particularly the modern life of actresses, from the high production values of the red carpet, to a staged off-duty look whilst getting a Starbucks in the certain knowledge that a paparazzo might be lurking in the parking lot, “the whole process!”

Meanwhile, the accompanying movie teasers, produced by Inez and Vinoodh, literally brought Paris to Tinseltown, with the Sacre Coeur nestled proudly in those Hollywood Hills—symbolic of Viard’s marriage of Parisian cool with laid-back, #WFH LA style.

The house of Chanel of course has a century-old relationship with actresses, as the recently opened exhibition Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto at Paris’s dedicated fashion museum the Palais Galliera (intelligently curated by Miren Arzalluz) revealed. The exhibition subtly integrates a number of Chanel garments worn in private life and on-screen by some of the 20th century’s fabled actresses—including Grace Kelly, Delphine Seyrig, and Jeanne Moreau—as well as the voice of Marilyn Monroe, who when asked what she wore in bed famously answered “Chanel No. 5.”

Coco Chanel, who began her career as a performer singing saucy music hall songs, later made over a handful of actresses in her own image, just as she did with such beloved models in her in-house cabine as Marie-Helene Arnaud and Jackie Rogers. The designer, for instance, transformed Romy Schneider into a baby faced version of herself, and Luchino Visconti immortalized Schneider’s new look in his 1962 short movie Boccaccio 70. Chanel herself is even said to have found the new stage name for the Nouvelle Vague actress Anna Karina (nee Hanne Karin Bayer). Viard, who has all these references at her fingertips, is also drawn to femme fatale Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle’s 1958 Elevator to the Gallows, and she looked to some on-screen Chanel moments in her collection.

There was also whisper of Alain Resnais’s highly stylized 1962 opus Last Year at Marienbad starring Delphine Seyrig, evoked in some fluttering black chiffon 1920s skirts and capes, worn with bead-frosted singlets. And the world of Jean Renoir’s 1939 The Rules of the Game inspired some pretty 1930s evening dresses in a Chanel document print which Viard had discovered from the same year that scattered the famous linked Cs amongst a field of gray blossoms. But Viard also used that satin print for a jumpsuit, because she was essentially evoking the real life wardrobes of contemporary actresses using her own cabine of models including many new French faces and the sophisticated Louise de Chevigny, (who, alongside Mika and Rianne, features in the Inez and Vinoodh movie clips). All of them were encouraged to do their actressy best on the runway.

The separates-based mix felt very Parisian girl cool—the sort of clothes that would appeal to hipster actresses Marion Cotillard and Anna Mougalis, for instance, who were among the guests attending the in-person show, recognizable even behind the mandatory white masks that were distributed at the door.

This meant big-shouldered 1980s looking Chanel suit jackets worn with petal pushers or stone washed denim jeans or tiny mini-skirts in candy pink or sky blue. Or an overscaled pale pink cardigan—traced with black piping that seemed hand-drawn—worn as a coat dress with a necklace that seemed assembled from cherished charms (and one of the metal linked C motif tiara headbands). Alongside those romantic black and white movie prints were overscale fluoro patterns printed on scarf silk that resembled graffiti but turned out on closer inspection to suggest neon-lit billboards advertising the latest epic by Coco or Chanel. There were even t-shirts with the old-fashioned countdown to a movie permanently frozen at 5 seconds.

“It felt like watching your very cool aunt or an extremely sassy, confident teenager,” noted playwright Jeremy O. Harris, “and I love how disparate those polarities are—so cool and great—and two women I want to be friends with and … want to be. Like, who doesn’t want to be Regina George?!”

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