Fall 2013 Menswear: Dior Homme and the Illuminati.

This show was very important to me for two reasons:

1. Ferociously minimalist suits. 
2. Fucken ILLUMINATI, YOU GUYS:

Ferociously minimalist suits are a major area of interest to me. From what I've seen so far, the extremely pared-down, knife-smooth suit is a main fixture this season -- and before you point out that at least 50% of Menswear Fashion Week is always grey suits: yes. I know. I'm aware that this distinction isn't necessarily important to everyone, but I tend to home in on every infinitesimal alteration made to the overal generic suit pattern. And as for the whole Illuminati thing: read on.

pics from Style.com

For whatever reason, Illuminati-inspired triangles are everywhere at the moment. Look up "Illuminati" on Tumblr, and half the tag is full of hipster teens taking pictures of themselves making triangle symbols with their hands. Ke$ha's latest music video was a mess of triangle/Illuminati imagery. There is even a subReddit for triangle enthusiasts. Dior Homme has taken this idea to its cleanest, most formalised extreme, with a single geometric pattern emblazoned across the chest and arms of several outfits in this season's show.

Compared to the severity of the rest of this collection, the simple red or white lines of the triangle/circle pattern seemed almost garish. The pinstripes on Dior Homme's suits were so slim as to be practically invisible, and anything so ostentatious as a necktie was exchewed in favour of a tiny, airplane-seatbelt style buckle. Although there were relatively few alterations made to the classic menswear suit silhouette, the fabric, accessories (or lack thereof) and ultra-narrow cut made these outfits seem like a very distant relative to the suits one sees in everyday life.

The creases and pinstripes on these trousers will be the death of me. Truly, I overidentify way too much with the protagonists of Jon Armstrong's Grey, a cyberpunk/sci-fi novel about minmalist suit enthusiasts.

There was something almost inhuman about the cleanliness of this show. Even the models wearing warm-weather gear looked as if they might not have a natural pulse, or were crafted entirely from plastic. And as we'll see in future posts, this is actually a popular theme among several other Menswear Fashion Week shows this season.

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Couture Fashion Week 2013: Chanel, Dior, and Ulyana Sergeenko

Click here for previous Chanel posts. 

Chanel's Mary Queen Of Scots collection last season was fantastic, so I can only assume that Karl Lagerfeld used up his yearly quota of awesome on that one. Bearing in mind that this is a Couture show, one would think that it would be better than Pre-Fall. Not so. Instead, the theme (Weimar Germany... something...?) was unclear at best, and totally absent at worst As a kind of psychological palate-cleanser, I'm going to start this post with the ugliest outfit of the show, just so we can get it over with and move on to better things:

This looks like someone put a bunch of lei garlands in a blender, spackled them all over a tube dress, and accessorised it with an apron jacket worn by a Midwestern housewife in the 1980s. Karl Lagerfeld, what were you thinking?

Most of the show was rather more sedate. 68 looks in all, this collection was mostly dedicated to Chanel-classic suits, although the tailoring was unfortunately even boxier than usual. Most puzzling of all were the shoes, which in addition to being open-toed boots (WHY?), were attached to lacey leggings that looked itchily uncomfortable and made the models' legs look wrinkly and shapeless.

The one dress that I'd actually wear:

I find it constantly bizarre that for someone so pathalogically obsessed with thinness (both personally and for women in general), Lagerfeld designs clothes that are just... not slimming at all. I mean, the suits this season are pretty damn cuboid, but this dress is just... a cone. A cone with arm-protectors. No wonder the model is crying her mascara all over her face: her knees are bleeding because the dress is made of concrete and doesn't bend when she walks.

 This is what the woman from the blended-garlands picture wore to her Prom:

Instead of the traditional solo bridal dress finale, Lagerfeld ended the show with a pair of brides as a kind of "fuck you" to the gay marriage debate currently going on in France at the moment. I agree in spirit, but the gowns themselves were... really not all that great.

Dior
Dior relies upon the sweeping, formal gown in the same way that Chanel relies upon the skirt-suit. Moreso, really, since Chanel is really Lagerfeld's brand now, whereas Dior is still very much reliant upon the same designs it was producing in it's heyday, the 1950s. The hope is that new Creative Director Raf Simons will revitalise the brand and become their very own Lagerfeld (or a scandal-free Galliano), but I'm yet to be convinced.

Raf Simons' previous role was Creative Director at Jil Sander, where he introduced a very minimalist design style that led to the hugely popular colour-blocking trend that's been everywhere for the past couple of years. He wouldn't have been my first choice for a ladylike, old-fashioned brand like Dior, but perhaps Dior is trying to take a step away from ladylike and old-fashioned. Whether or not that was their actual aim, this show was not particularly impressive. It had little of the luxurious detail of recent Dior couture collections, seeming more like a combination of rather conservative classic Dior designs with a few jarringly unexpected Raf Simons outfits thrown in to remind everyone that he was there.

This yellow dress was one of my few genuine favourites. The two-layer cutaway is interesting, but the extreme simplicity of the shape and colour of the dress as a whole helped to balance it out. Honestly, it looks far more Raf Simons than Dior, but I'll take it.

 

Ulyana Sergeenko
I had nothing but good things to say about Ulyana Sergeenko's Couture show last year, and even though this was a little cheesier than expected, it had its good points.

In a complete u-turn from last year's nod to Sergeenko's Russian heritage, this collection was all about America. On the bright side, it didn't have any denim-clad cowboys, which is more than one can say for 99% of other USA-themed fashion shows. But it was guided by Hollywood's depiction of America (not exactly an unexplored topic in the world of fashion), leading to things like this pretty but somewhat pointless version of Scarlett O'Hara's green curtain dress in Gone With The Wind:

Rather more to my taste was this ultra-tailored black Puritan dress, which had a kind of fetishised conservatism that the goth in me just can't resist. I'm glad to see that Sergeenko is retaining the long, heavy skirts from her earlier work, since there are so few designers who ever go for this look. Most designers are so concerned with femininity and a slim silhouette that skirts like this are dismissed as unflattering, but Sergeenko is proving that they can be worn with style.

I'm not 100% clear on what this final outfit was supposed to be, but I'm pretty sure Tailor Swift is going to be wearing it in her next video.

Click here for previous Chanel posts.

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Spring 2012 Haute Couture: Dior, Mabille, Valli, Givenchy, Versace, and Armani.

Christian Dior

It's rare for me to agree with anything the Guardian' Fashion Editor Jess Cartner-Morley writes, but today's "Has couture lost its edge?" article was pretty spot on. So far the shows at Couture Fashion Week have been lacklustre, when ordinarily they'd be the highlight of the fashion world's year. That's the danger of working in an art form that relies upon funding from retail business and work from hundreds of disparate corporate employees worldwide. In times of economic difficulty, imagination and creativity have to fall by the wayside in favour of saleability and broad appeal. The Dior show was a textbook  example of this: sumptuous quality combined with a back-to-basics approach to the classic New Look silhouette -- a collection that could have been released at any time in the last 60 years, and sold well in any of them.

I have less criticism for Dior than I do for many of the other designers who resorted to trotting out entire collections of tired gown clichés this season. The New Look is Dior's heritage and legacy, and the quality of their Couture is so high that I can excuse a season or two of relatively bland designs. Plus, when Dior stages a Couture show they really know how to go for full-on glamour and allow the models to work it for once, instead of making them strut and down like seething, expressionless droids.

All pics from Style.com

Alexis Mabille

Another example of beautifully-made gowns that are ultimately rather dull. This show had something of the designer's sketchbook about it -- colour-coded outfits wherein almost every model was wearing a relatively normal-looking dress such as one might find at any high-end store, plus matching facepaint and an enormous flower head-dress to spruce it up. It all seemed rather expected -- a sense of colourful richness but with very little thought behind it, and no theme outside the blindingly obvious statement of colour-coded formalwear and extravagant hats.

Giambattista Valli
I picked these two outfits since they so efficiently illustrate the many similiarities between the Giambattista Valli and Christian Dior collections. A largely monochromatic palette with a few hints of pastel colour thrown in, narrow-waisted hourglass figures, and a multitude of sheer skirts. Superficial similarities, but close enough that having looked at the Dior show first, Giambattista Valli left me feeling thoroughly bored. While Dior was very obviously Couture -- and quite married to the classic full-skirted New Look silhouette -- many of the Giambattista Valli designs could have come from a ready-to-wear show, since they were little more than classically feminine evening dresses or pencil skirt combos made with transluscent fabric to inject a little daring into the proceedings.

Givenchy
Thanks to the presence of the basketball, this immediately reminded me of Alien: Resurrection. Sigourney Weaver's brown leather costume wasn't a million miles away from some of Givenchy's scaly, bug-like designs this season, and the basketball scene is one of the most iconic scenes in that movie. Givenchy was the first departure from outright prettiness that I'd seen this season, and it was a welcome change.

The sci-fi comparisons aren't unfair. Like Versace, Givenchy's show was partially inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, combining the the grim and practical with the floor-length glamour of 1930s evening gowns. I will express no surprise whatsoever if Rooney Mara ends up wearing something from this collection to the Oscars.

Versace
This was Versace's first Couture show since 2004, and it might have been a wise idea to leave the public showings for another year. The cheap backdrop and garish lighting gave the whole thing something of a gameshow feel, and the designs themselves -- supposedly themed around the movie Metropolis, which was decidedly not known for its bright colour scheme -- mostly looked like B-grade Lady Gaga costumes. And Lady Gaga doesn't do B-grade. 

Outfits like this almost smacked of degree shows and trainee designers -- it's nothing more than an extremely simple evening dress, plus wire contouring on one side to give it that space-age look. A watered-down version of mid-90s Thierry Mugler's brightly-coloured, structural extremism. Several of the designs almost looked (dare I say it) cheap, which is the ultimate no-no for Couture.

Armani Prive
Snakeskin and business-casual: not a combination you hope or expect to see outside of garish '90s TV. But this time I think it worked, partly because there was no serious suggestion that this was real officewear, and partly because the snake theme was so evident throughout the show. Evident, but unlike the aimlessly colour-coded outfits at Alexis Mabille, not without substance.

Every single outfit had some aspect of the snake to it. All were sleek and coloured around green jewel tones and glossy black, but the fabrics ranged from literal (fake snakeskin) to more experimental (snake print, fishnet that from afar gave the impression of mottled scale patterns, overlapping sequins, and interlocking slats of fabric that resembled an extreme close-up of scales).

The only actual snakes present were in tiny details. If any of the models had actually been dressed as snakes instead of merely holding a couple of snakelike characteristics, the show would have tipped over into the realm of obviousness.

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