F/W 2021.22 Haute Couture Open Discussion Thread | Page 3 | the Fashion Spot

F/W 2021.22 Haute Couture Open Discussion Thread

Rucci’s sketches look stunning! über curious to see!

Fendi… I like the hair which is what we can see so far and the earrings (which he could’ve updated since on his last (and first…) HC show the earrings were also huge.
Kate and Christy faces look so rough! #botox
let’s wait and see I guess.
 
HAUTE COUTURE
How Do You Follow a Fashion Legend?
Alaïa’s new designer debuts in Paris.

By Cathy Horyn


The story of how the diminutive Tunisian-born designer Azzedine Alaïa became a giant in French fashion — one of the most original and influential in all of fashion — is well known. But here is a little-known fact to savor: Alaïa hit Paris in 1956, around the age of 20, but didn’t have his first runway show until 1982. And not in Paris, but at Bergdorf Goodman in New York. Alaïa’s black sensuous clothes had first been discovered by some French editors, among them Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, but it was Bill Cunningham’s photos, taken of the editors outside the Paris shows, that set off the explosion. The reason Bergdorf could claim him is the reason American retailers were supreme: People religiously shopped in stores. Just as important, a designer had time to develop his skills. That is no longer the case.

Carla Sozzani told me this story on Sunday night in the cobblestoned courtyard of Alaïa’s maison. A former editor herself, Sozzani is a founder of the store Corso Como and was close to Alaïa. Since his death in 2017, she has run the foundation that owns his massive archive as well as the building that housed his studio, ateliers, and living quarters. She and the curator Olivier Saillard regularly stage exhibitions of his work in the cavernous wrought-iron hall that once served as his show space. A selection of Alaïa’s work from the ’80s is currently on display along with photographs by Peter Lindbergh.

Of course, I didn’t come to Paris to view Alaïa’s old clothes. I came to see the new designs of his successor, Pieter Mulier, and also to see the fall haute couture collections — the first live shows in more than a year. Successions are a big deal in fashion, perhaps because since the mid-’90s, when groups like LVMH began buying up couture houses, they’ve been the pattern. Find a gifted young talent to perk up your dusty name. In recent years, a social-media presence has been a plus. Look at the huge success of Virgil Abloh, the men’s designer at Louis Vuitton, who just opened a boutique near the Place Vendôme for his Off-White label and on Sunday staged a lively show with a performance by M.I.A. It wasn’t haute couture, but it was certainly a bid to appear more grown up and polished, and it mostly worked, thanks to the minimalist electric-colored sheaths with a rigid flap down the sides or a kind of built-in bustle.

The Alaïa brand is utterly different. For a designer, it is both a dream job and a nightmare, because his forms, his silhouette, were so individual, the result of decades of refinement. Do you simply reproduce the strong, slightly rounded shoulders of his coats, their nipped waists? What about his sensuous knitwear, including his famous mummy and so-called bandage dresses that caused such a sensation in the ’80s and ’90s? And how do you capture that subtle, magical sex appeal that piped through all his work, which the late writer Ingrid Sischy probably summed up best when she called it “Follow me, garçon”?

In my view, Mulier’s debut collection felt more strategic than emotional. It was held in the street in front of the house, in part to satisfy COVID rules — you don’t need to wear masks outdoors — and in part to project a democratic mood. (It’s also true that the Alaïa Foundation, as owner of the building, didn’t grant Richemont, which owns the label, access to the wrought-iron show space, though that could change in the future.) Mulier said he was struck by the “democracy” of Alaïa’s collections, that he designed for women of all ages and body types and played host at his famous kitchen lunches and dinners to an eclectic range of individuals, from politicians to seamstresses.

Mulier also sensed, he told me, that many young people don’t know Alaïa. As he put it, “They know the image but not the work.” He didn’t look at the archive, but after he was hired, in February, he began buying vintage pieces to add to his visual knowledge of Alaïa. He also borrowed from the foundation the original sales books from the Alaïa Beverly Hills boutique, back in its ’80s heyday, to see what people were buying. “They inspired me so much,” he said. Again, it was the democratic element.

I must say, though, the scene on Sunday night on the Rue de Moussy was strange, for various reasons. In a way, nothing had changed — familiar-looking people were once again gathering for a show. But in another way, everything had changed. We were back in the world but at the same time groping our way toward it. The old jocularity, the easy preshow familiarity, was not quite there. At least the kissing was gone, thank God.

Perhaps in that same vein, I sensed that people wanted to love Mulier’s clothes — the new crisp version of the mummy dress with streamers, the fluffy pastel coats, the slinky dresses with hoods à la Grace Jones (an Alaïa client) — but didn’t quite love them. To be fair, he was showing his clothes to the toughest bunch — the editors, stylists, designers, and friends who knew not only the man but the clothes. Inside and out.

I think, on the whole, Mulier, who spent roughly 15 years as Raf Simons’s right hand, did a fine job. He met his brief, which was to introduce Alaïa to a new audience, one shaped by the fast, sharp, simplified imagery of the digital age. This was a reductive view of Alaïa, potentially shaped for e-commerce. The Alaïa company only has a few of its own retail outlets, in Paris and London; and some of its retail partners, notably Barneys, are out of business. It’s a new world indeed.

As much as I enjoyed being back on familiar ground — I spent a lot of happy evenings in Alaïa’s kitchen and watching him work in his studio, a cat stretched out on his table — it was also disconcerting. I wondered if it was a good idea to host a show, and a dinner, just steps from Alaïa’s own work, the incredible mid-’80s coats on display in the exhibit, the perfectly cut knit minidresses. For it was no accident that these things looked perfect. Alaïa spent hours and hours, sometimes weeks, getting the fit, the line, just right.

And that’s becoming less and less possible today in high fashion. Alaïa knew that and fought against it, making far less money than other luxury brands in order to have the freedom to design.

I brought up that telling difference of the clothes in the exhibit with Mulier, and he agreed but said, “It took him 14, 15, 16 months to make a jacket, and we don’t live in that world anymore.” True, but many of Alaïa’s competitors do still worry about the perfection of the subtle details. And for that price, customers expect it.
source | nymag
 
Just before y'all watch, I am going to warn you, so you don't have a heart attack:
Demna sent f**king jeans, knit cozy sweaters, bomber jackets for couture. It has generic coats, generic suits, ugly casting, but (!) there is a little thimbleful of nice looks. They are, of course, good, because they are a total carbon copy of Cristobal's originals. The rest is a total insult, a total disrespect for couture, a certain historical moment - never have I ever seen the craft of carefully selected and decade-perfected techniques and expensive thousand-hour worthy textile prints and embellishments for couture to be discarded and any tailored thrown out of the window.

Also, the hats are Dior + Mugler for Lady Gaga mash up, an obvious rip-off too. The walks, the gracelessness and roboticism of the models...
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Just before y'all watch, I am going to warn you, so you don't have a heart attack:
Demna sent f**king jeans, knit cozy sweaters, bomber jackets for couture. It has generic coats, generic suits, ugly casting, but (!) there is a little thimbleful of nice looks. They are, of course, good, because they are a total carbon copy of Cristobal's originals. The rest is a total insult, a total disrespect for couture, a certain historical moment - never have I ever seen the craft of carefully selected and decade-perfected techniques and expensive thousand-hour worthy textile prints and embellishments for couture to be discarded and any tailored thrown out of the window.

Also, the hats are Dior + Mugler for Lady Gaga mash up, an obvious rip-off too. The walks, the gracelessness and roboticism of the models...

"ugly casting". Who are you to say who is beautiful and ugly ? The casting was strong and featured unusual faces (unlike 99% of the brands) to me.

I think the daily vestiaire (jeans, hoodie, tracksuits.... ) elevated to couture is a great idea. I am sure that gray hoodie is made from a very expensive material and probably handstitched with couture finishings inside. Well that's what at least I hope. And maybe it's the same for the "mundane" pieces.
Can't wait to learn more about the fabrics / textile treatments / finishings and techniques used in this collection.
 
@IloveDiorHomme, I am an individual with my own opinion on things outside of the hype and blind acceptance of no standards whatsoever. And who are you to tell me off, again? I can’t take a comment seriously form a person that endorsed hoodies and jeans that look like a sad college student attempt during their first semester.
 
"ugly casting". Who are you to say who is beautiful and ugly ? The casting was strong and featured unusual faces (unlike 99% of the brands) to me.
If you want to use unusual models at least make sure they don't look like homeless addicts, sexual predators or psychiatric ward escapees.
Demna's casting choices always come of as pretentious to me. JPG's shows were filled with people who were far from the industry standards but they never looked miserable nor uncomfortable.
 
I hope you guys are aware that Cristobal himself used unusual models who were usually considered 'ugly'. They were distant and rather fast, looking above audience's heads.
 
lol these blind meisel fan boys again :rolleyes: who takes their comments seriously?
 
i don't mind the casting at all but I do mind all those scrunched up fabric around the coats... You'd think they would atleast drape it gloriously for a couture collection.
 
A conversation with Pierapaolo about the forthcoming Valentino Haute Couture show in Venice:

Canal+
 
Pyer Moss is showing their couture collection in New York today.
 
HAUTE COUTURE
Chanel, Dior, and a Room Full of Giant Paper Clouds
The view from couture week in Paris so far.

By Cathy Horyn


Edward Enninful, the editor of British Vogue, was standing with the designer Nicolas Ghesquière near the head table at Louis Vuitton’s dinner for Frank Gehry on Monday, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the contemporary art center Gehry designed in the Bois de Boulogne that looks like a sailing ship. Or a flock of gulls come for a rest. Floating high above the tables — set with mounds of blue and white hydrangea and gleaming crystal — were giant paper clouds.

Well, why not? When you’re Frank Gehry and you have the resources of LVMH, you can conjure anything. The clouds were actually apropos of a new fragrance — rather, a series of perfumes — for which Gehry provided the bottle design, “Cosmic Cloud” being one. The scents are the work of Vuitton’s “nose,” Jacques Cavallier-Belletrud. He’d even supplied the tables with mini-atomizers of hand sanitizer infused with lavender grown near his home in Grasse.

It was all a little heady. The flowers, the delicious food and wine, not to mention the highly unusual fact that there were a mere 100 guests, including Florence Pugh and her mom. By the time Katy Perry, in a spangled dress, came out to sing, I was ready to smash my face in the dessert, something called Absolu chocolat et poire enveloppée délicatement.

After nearly 16 months of lockdowns, sweatpants, isolation, home cooking, and Zoom fatigue, I was ready for a little enveloppée. I asked Enninful how he felt about physical reentry into the fashion world and all its glittering satellites.

“Give me five minutes,” he said, and then, with a twinkle. “Well, a minute.”

Ordinarily, I don’t cover the Paris haute couture — that is, the made-to-measure collections produced by fewer than a dozen houses for the super-rich and discerning — although in recent years they’ve become an engine of creativity. But these shows mark the return of actual showings after the only pause since the German occupation during the Second World War, and I wanted to see how the couturiers and ateliers would respond.

Would there be more color, a release of pent-up energy? Paris has certainly reopened. The cafés are bustling. In the evenings, young people flock to the wide lawns near Les Invalides. “It’s like they’re erasing the memory of the bad time,” said the designer Giambattista Valli, whose tulle and silk confections are meant to span a night in Paris, through dawn, and have more than a touch of the erotic in them, with densely layered skirts sometimes splitting open at the pelvis and superbly done pantsuits in menswear silk married with long, hooded capes out of a Parisian bordello fantasy.

Or would the collections be more subdued and cautious, as if still in the shadows of a plague? That was the sense I got, partly, from Maria Grazia Chiuri’s chaste collection for Dior, with its many head-to-toe looks — riding-style hats, coats, full skirts, boots — in gray and brown tweeds, the tones of the North Sea coast. In contrast to Chiuri’s sublime January couture show, this one was stubbornly grounded, almost drained of fantasy. Even her many pleated goddess dresses refused to dazzle, although they were perfectly pretty.

Yet the show quietly imparted a virtue of an institution too often condemned as extravagant and shallow (as if there’s anything wrong with either quality in the context of self-presentation). Those tweeds were hand-loomed and often a subtle patchwork of textures. Lining the walls of the show space — a tent behind the Musée Rodin — was an embroidered mural, its panels done by a needlecraft school in Mumbai that Dior supports, based on an abstract landscape design by the artist Eva Jospin. After two full seasons of viewing clothes on screens, Chiuri was giving her small, socially distanced audience what they had been craving: a heavy dose of materiality. At the same time, she was celebrating the trades that are the essence of couture. As she said during fittings, “Couture is also about relationships.”

In that spirit, there are dinners every night — Chanel on Tuesday in the courtyard of the Palais Galliera, Balenciaga on Wednesday in the Pinault family’s new art center at the old Bourse de Commerce.

The Galliera was also the setting for the Chanel show and, in the galleries, an extraordinary exhibit of the work of Gabrielle Chanel. On the way to my seat in the courtyard, I ran into Lagerfeld’s long-time muse, Amanda Harlech, whom I hadn’t seen since March 2020. The COVID restrictions and the fact that there are few journalists there — mostly American and European — has made the shows feel intimate. “I don’t necessarily want to see big shows again,” she said, “but I can’t look at a screen — I’m over it.” I handed her one of the hand sanitizers I had filched from the Vuitton party, and the air suddenly smelled of lavender.

The models descended some steps from the grand colonnade of the museum, their hair plaited in faux Mohawks. Above them, the sky was gray. Though the scale of the space worked somewhat against Virginie Viard, this was her most interesting and thoughtful work since succeeding Lagerfeld. She used the colors and techniques of Impressionist painters like Manet and Morisot to create embroidered pieces, results that looked like paint strokes and daubs on classical Chanel shapes. Some of the “tweed” jackets and skirts could well have been embroidered — the house has done that before — and a red floral jacket was actually tiny feathers.

It was an astonishing display of craft, for sure, but Viard’s rendering of French painting was hardly literal, and that made the designs feel alive and modern. One of my favorite looks was a white-speckled black wool suit — lanky and relaxed, in the Chanel mode — with a plain, shimmery, water-blue sequined blouse. If some of the pinks and creams seem sprung from a garden, that was no accident. In her show notes, Viard said, “I like to mix a touch of England with a very French style.”

Flowers also exploded at Armani Privé and Schiaparelli. As lovely and ethereal as Giorgio Armani’s many tiered dresses were, his short jackets and trousers just looked unanswerably right.

Daniel Roseberry has quickly made Schiaparelli part of the conversation again in Paris, in part because he is so free at conversing with fashion’s past. “There’s a little bit of Lacroix,” he said, pausing before a nipped-waist jacket made of vintage denim with rounded, gold embroidered sleeves. There’s a little bit of Cocteau (in a jacket smothered around the shoulders with pressed, hand-painted pink roses) and shades of McQueen’s “bumster” pants (in a fanny-shaped ornament), and when I saw a glossy black cape made of “fringed” trash bags, I thought of Margiela. Roseberry has a wonderful sense of wit along with a feeling for color (think Koons), and the workmanship is impeccable.

But there’s a problem with many of the clothes; not just his, but also Viard’s and Chiuri’s. They are often visually heavy. Because they are made by hand, with minimal linings and so on, I know they feel almost weightless on the body, even Chanel’s exquisite embroidered pieces. They feel like nothing. But I’m talking about the visual effect — the too-big shoulders, the amount of trimmings and decoration (mainly at Schiaparelli). It produces a leaden effect.

I only thought of this because I saw Coco Chanel’s boucle suits in the exhibit. The three elements — jacket, top (virtually a T-shirt of its time), and A-line skirt — look blown on the body. Curious, I asked Alexandre Samson, a curator at the museum, if he knew the weight of her jackets, and of course he did. The spring jackets weigh between 13.83 ounces and 20.70 ounces, he reported, and the fall ones between 21.16 ounces and 25.78 ounces.

“A Gabrielle Chanel suit is maybe the lightest structure you could imagine in the history of fashion,” he wrote in an email.

A Chanel archivist told me it would be difficult to know if there’s been a significant change in the past 20 years without weighing a selection of jackets.

But there’s no doubt that clothes have become more complicated, more overworked — perhaps in an effort to appeal to consumers’ expectations of value. It would be an interesting exercise, though, if Viard, Chiuri, and Roseberry, to mention only three talents, were to make something that looks weightless in every sense. And couture is the place to do it. How dazzling would that be?
source | nymag
 
Cathy almost always nails it. She just gets it and isn't afraid to ask the tough questions in an industry full of people only capable of blowing smoke up an a*s.

Totally agree with her about the lightness issue. You look back at many of Lagerfeld's best Couture collections and the flou literally looks like a breeze on the body...lighter than air. Galliano could make a bias dress look like it was poured on the body. Gaultier could stir up a bridal confection that looked lighter than whipped cream. Lacroix could throw all the fabric and trims in the world on a gown and make it look like it was held together simply by crossing your fingers and holding your breath.

Obviously, these designers didn't do the sewing themselves, but they were in command of their ateliers and pushed them to those heights. Designer's today seem to be incapable of imagining such clothes, let alone demanding them of their petite mains.
 
Last edited:
And do we really need Pyer Moss "Couture".

Am actually excited to see his collection. He has a point of view that you dont find in the industry and seems more authentic than Virgil.
 
And do we really need Pyer Moss "Couture".
I like him, I find him cute and I think there’s something in there in terms of potential that is so much underused…
Much like @Urban Stylin , I’m curious to see what he does…

But like you, I wonder if we need Pyer Moss Couture. I feel like with him, it’s always more about the intention, the conversation, « The first » such and such than the designs.
I remember a great wedding dress from him but that’s it.

I find difficult to say « his aesthetic is about » and already, he is in Haute Couture.
Part of me thinks that there’s this ego of wanting to be the first African American designer to present officially in HC.
Imane Ayissi is the first black African who did it. It took him years of confidence to decide to apply to show HC…
If we want to be technical, Azzedine Alaia was the first African designer to be aknowledge as Couturier…

I hope that Kerby’s collection will speak for itself.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

New Posts

Forum Statistics

Threads
215,210
Messages
15,291,275
Members
89,138
Latest member
anon9821
Back
Top