long but interesting article on Charlie Porter's choice of the Dress of the Year .. as posted in the Guardian UK, enjoy the read
(hint:includes quotes by Alber Elbaz of Lanvin)
(hint:includes quotes by Alber Elbaz of Lanvin)
[/FONT]When Charlie Porter was asked to choose the dress of the year for the Museum of Costume, he faced a nervous two months. But one designer's soft volume and clever cut won through
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Saturday December 3, 2005
The Guardian
The dress is so knife-edge - it can go either way. We know all about the take-a-deep-breath, corseted kind. Much more modern is a dress that's easy: throw it over your head, and it's done. Dresses are on my mind because a couple of months ago the Museum Of Costume in Bath asked me to choose its Dress Of The Year. Each year they pick a writer to select an outfit to enter the permanent collection, which is already home to 30,000 pieces of clothing from the 16th century onwards.
Making my choice, I know I want something that offers a wider point of view than the glamour gown. So vast swathes of womenswear 2005 are rejected. Then comes the agonising, the friendship-straining worry, the retrospective doubt. To calm my nerves, I have to work out why I've turned down all these options. Something I realised quickly: I wasn't choosing a dress for Madame Tussauds.
When I told a friend my task, straight away she said Roland Mouret. The Galaxy dress! At the start of the season, that heavy hourglass design with angular cap sleeves had already been deified by the admirable few: Diaz, Johansson, Watts. In terms of the tabloid lens, the Galaxy's dress-of-the-year rating seemed assured. But when Mouret revealed the Galaxy at his New York show in February, it left me empty. Thick fabric containing the body, finesse sacrificed to ensure a curved waist and bum, ability to walk absolutely constricted. It's a woman's prerogative to engage with clothing that in some way inhibits her movement or gives her pain - high heels, corsets, pencil skirts - but there are designers who can give alluring shape without these restrictions.
For me, the Galaxy had never been an option, but events soon conspired to render it redundant anyway. A couple of weeks later, my friend texted, all forlorn: not only had Carol Vorderman turned up at a premiere in the Galaxy, she wore the same dress on Ant and Dec's revival of Play Your Cards Right. The breathless romance of the piece was shot. Then came the shock news: Mouret had quit his own label, citing differences with management. My dress of the year could not become a cautionary tale.
The past 12 months in fashion have been about a woman's relationship with shape. It has often been extreme, like the vast, dark puddings of skirts by Marc Jacobs, currently on sale, or the abrupt tulips that heralded Stefano Pilati's takeover from Tom Ford at Yves Saint Laurent. This shape interest hasn't been confined to skirts: Topshop's hit little jacket of the past few months is Marni-like in its shortened form, standing away from the body. None of these was a candidate.
In fact, that Marc Jacobs autumn/winter 2005 collection caused a split floor when it was shown in February. Many saw it as an ugly aberration. Others felt it was the start of the next big cycle of fashion change. Jacobs appeared to resolve the conundrum himself at his spring/summer 2006 collection: he returned to American classics of a more regular size.
Pilati's show for YSL was the turnaround shock of the year. Originally mocked, his wide waist belts have been much copied. But there was a simple reason not to pick it for the museum: YSL has been selected twice in the past four years. In 2001, Alexandra Shulman of Vogue chose the prairie blouse, velvet skirt and knee-high boots created for the label by Tom Ford. And last year, Sarahjane Hoare of Vanity Fair picked a gown from Ford's final collection for the house.
The machinations at the house are a gripping story, but I wanted to cast the net wider. Marni? It should have been chosen years ago, since the house works around essentially the same silhouette. Topshop? Come on! The museum accepts public donations so you could always offer that yourself. It seems churlish to waste this chance to get them something rare.
An easy decision for me was the menswear outfit. I feel I've said the words "Thom" and "Browne" more often than my own name this year. Men's outfits are rarely picked for the museum alongside a women's look - a shame, since our history of dress should reflect both genders. The most recent men's additions have been a Paul Smith suit chosen by Tamsin Blanchard, then of the Independent, in 1996, and a Jigsaw Menswear outfit picked by Iain R Webb, then of Elle, in 1998. I can't make up for what's missing - there should be Dior Homme, Raf Simons, Prada and Jil Sander for the years since - but, for 2005, Thom Browne encapsulates what's working in menswear. Snappy, shortened, handmade, silhouette-redefining: this New York designer has reinvigorated tailoring.
"It's for that guy that has run away from suits," Browne told me earlier this year at his office in the meatpacking district of New York. "I don't see it as fashion, I just see it as beautifully made clothes." The details alone - covered buttons, half-lining in seersucker, ribbon-trim finish - make it a museum-worthy piece. But it was thinking about Browne that explained my jitters over choosing the dress. I've focused on menswear for the past couple of years. In fashion you work on instinct, and while my womenswear instincts are still there, they're no longer tested - I'm an observer; I don't have to justify my beliefs.
Still, gut feelings are what I will follow. Since the email from the museum arrived, I've been feeling a pull towards Lanvin. Designed for the past four years by Alber Elbaz, the label is at the centre of a quiet storm, replacing superficial attempts at glamour with an idea of beauty that works with the wearer. "For me, the dress isn't a piece of feminine romance," Elbaz says, on the phone from his studio in Paris. "It should be something easy that you don't have to think about. It is like a new uniform." Just before the spring/summer 2005 collection, Elbaz broke his wrist. "It started from the injury," he says. "I couldn't sketch, so I just draped, circling more like clouds than straight pieces."
In the season of volume, here was shape with a purpose. "It wasn't about the 50s, it was more about freedom," he continues. "What I see is that women are rushing more than ever before. You can either go for a slim shape, or give more fabric so women can be even more dynamic." Here there was an ease about the shape, an interpretation of size for daywear, an understanding of fabric and the limits to which it can be pushed. This is more than volume as fashion: it's volume as a dressmaker's experiment.
A colleague regularly visits the Lanvin store in Paris. On a visit earlier this year, 43-year-old Elbaz came down from his studio above the shop and said she should try on a dress with a particularly high neckline. She refused, because she knew the piece wouldn't suit her. But Elbaz insisted. And if she didn't like it? He'd get out his scissors, cut the dress and make it right. Result? He was right: the dress was perfect as it was.
You don't get such a powerful, personal presence from a conglomerate. The direct connection to the designer, felt in all the clothes sold under the Lanvin label, is something new in ready-to-wear. This isn't a snobbish return to us-and-them mentality, since the new fashion-obsessed women's weeklies such as Grazia are fully conversant with small-output labels such as Lanvin and the similarly reborn Rochas. These ready-to-wear houses are not much more expensive than most other designer clothing, but it's in these studios where you're getting something for your money and where the intriguing work lies.
And so I come to my dress of the year - the balloon dress, by Lanvin, from spring/summer 05, which went on sale at €1,360 (£930). It encapsulates Elbaz's confident dexterity: there's no padding or tricks, just a cleverly treated fabric and brilliance of cut.
When the donated dress arrived in my office, it was folded flat in four. What turns it into the balloon is the silk faille (which Elbaz first threw in the washing machine to soften and curiously invigorate the cloth) and the construction, the skirt of the dress gathered at the exposed-seam drop waist before plumping out to its full volume, pockets at the hips encouraging the shape to remain forward.
When I took the dress down to the museum in Bath, the curator, Rosemary Harden, remembered something in her archive. She knew exactly where it was among her thousands of pieces, a Jeanne Lanvin dress from 1919. Although different in mood - the original had a dated air of frilled edge and pomp - there were echoes in the drop waist and shape of the skirt. But at the hips wide panniers forced out the older dress, the tiers down the skirt exaggerating its size. It's this comparison that brings out the brilliance of today's dress: back then there was the reliance on support, but Elbaz gets that with his scissors.
"There's no construction, no petticoat," he affirms. "The silk faille is totally from couture. In fashion it's considered old and unfriendly, but by washing it you're softening the fabric so that it has a better dialogue with the body. It is a gorgeous fabric to work with - all the pleats and folds gave me the volume without it being rigid or heavy."
What unites both my choices for the museum is the way that dressmaking and tailoring skills have pushed these designers to the forefront of fashion. It's a thrilling advance, especially in the year that cherished names Jil Sander and Helmut Lang fell by the wayside at the hands of conglomerate politics. My choice has been dictated by this long-term movement for the good of fashion, rather than by the sterile scorecard of the red carpet. "As a designer," says Elbaz, "you either go and create for a fashion show, or you create fashion for life." · The Dress Of The Year is at the Museum of Costume in Bath from Monday, 01225 477173 (museumofcostume.co.uk). Charlie Porter is associate editor of GQ
