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The new sobriety: Covering up the body
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2006
PARIS The forecast for the new fashion season is as somber as it is certain. It is going to be a long dark winter.
After a decade of free-fall hipster pants, bared midriffs, bras on show under sheer dresses and naked legs, fashion has started on its great coverup. Forget girlie frills and celebrities flashing flesh on the red carpet. The typical outfit in the current international fashion collections is in any color as long as it is black with a silhouette long, lean and layered.
The mood is now for a chaste sobriety, with sturdy fabrics, thick leggings and even ankle-length hemlines.
The world's leading designers have no doubts as to where fashion is headed as they talk about "restraint" and "sobriety."
"I think 'modesty' is a beautiful word today - and a beautiful attitude," says Lanvin's Alber Elbaz, who has built his career on designing dresses with a respectful attitude to women.
Marc Jacobs, founding father of the girl-woman aesthetic, shocked the audience at his New York show last month with hefty knits, leg warmers and thick layers of clothes shrouding the body.
"The leg thing was a conscious decision," says Jacobs. "Early on I knew I wanted to show pants under skirts - and I didn't want to do pink and frills."
As Karl Lagerfeld, whose New York show debut featured entirely long, dark, layered clothes, puts it: "If you read the daily papers, you are not in the mood for pink and green."
Various influences are pushing fashion away from bare-it-all vulgarity - not least that there is nowhere to go but up from low-slung pants and strapless gowns. But among themselves, thoughtful designers are putting the change of mood into a different context, as they talk about the "Muslim-ization" of fashion. They are referring both to drawing, deliberately or unconsciously, on a culture of female sobriety. In a world clearly in turmoil, cocooning clothes are a response.
With the wearing of Muslim headscarves in school an abrasive issue in France and after the violent reaction in the Muslim world to the Danish cartoons considered disrespectful to the prophet Mohammed, few designers want to speculate openly about the influence of visual exposure to constant news reports on the Muslim world. Jacobs describes how his multicultural references included snap shots of Arab women with only eyes uncovered, but that he deliberately effaced the shrouded Muslim women in the corner of the collage.
"It looked a little scary to us because of what has happened in the wider world," he said.
As with any artist, the creative process of fashion design is complex. Lagerfeld said that he surprised himself by designing ankle-length white shirts, only realizing afterwards that they looked like a fashion take on Arabian culture.
"It was very strange," Lagerfeld says. "It goes in your mind and out of your fingers. You don't do it on purpose. It is about sensitivity and one cannot escape this kind of influence. It also has something mysterious, a mood of danger - something exciting."
There is nothing new about designers sampling foreign cultures. The caftan has been a staple beach coverup since Yves Saint Laurent, born and raised in Algeria, made it a part of his collections. Djellabas are considered vaguely exotic, but have never previously been seen as an overt reference to the Muslim world.
Many liberated westerners might be dismayed at the idea of fashion absorbing any form of dress that suggests the subjugation of women - or of discussing a subject that has so many connotations and overtones.
"We have talked about the Muslim- ization in fashion, but I don't want to be quoted," says one Paris-based designer, referring to conversations between himself and his partner. "I remember what an idiot Tom Ford looked when he raved about Hamid Karzai's robes, with all that was going on in Iran. It just makes fashion seem so dumb."
Muiccia Prada, an intelligent woman designer whose subversive aesthetic always veers toward sobriety, is not convinced that the Muslim factor even comes into the equation.
"It's a very difficult question," she says, saying that she believes that covering up is more about the eternal fashion play on "more sexy and less sexy."
"But we are in a very interesting moment," she says. "We have to deal now with a whole world connected."
Nobody is really suggesting that the winter 2006 shows are covering the body for political reasons, although Olivier Saillard, program curator for fashion at the Paris Musée des Arts Décoratifs, said at this week's Yohji Yamamoto show (where the clothes were over-size, body-concealing and with giant crosses, as for crusaders) that "fashion is much more political" than it was 20 years ago.
The Japanese Yamamoto, a designer of poetic, romantic clothes for a quarter of a century, said backstage: "I am very bored with tiny, sexy little fashion and with T-shirts and jeans - I want women's clothes."
Asked about the Christian symbol, he said: "I don't know what it meant. I don't know why I did it."
A visceral reaction to the ultra-sexy and over-exposed is often behind the change of fashion faith. Jacobs talks of listening to the singer Pink and her disc "Stupid Girls" - and then putting Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson in the context of America not yet having elected a woman president.
Elbaz says: "Fashion is about the moment, about what is relevant. Every day wherever I go, women are in charge. You cannot play with women; they are serious about themselves."
For a new generation of designers, covering up women is an aesthetic choice. The Belgian Olivier Theyskens, 29, the creative force at Rochas, was one of the first to practice a delicate restraint.
"I have always had a problem with vulgarity," says Theyskens. "I like a certain sobriety. It is above all a way of looking at a woman. I don't want to push the barrier of dignity. I think it is vulgar to display skin, although I like bared backs - there is a certain sensuality. I am not interested in sexy glamour. I want something more poetic and romantic."
Riccardo Tischi, 31, the designer for Givenchy has a similar outlook. His January couture show featured the ankle-length hemlines which gave a chic sobriety to his line.
"Everything starts from your background," says the designer, who comes from a modest and traditional Catholic family in southern Italy, where he is the only son among eight sisters.
"I think of fashion as emotion and the center of my life is my family," says Tischi, who lived in England for seven years and studied at Central Saint Martin's fashion school.
"People say that Italian style is sexy, but my woman never looks vulgar. She is sensual, confident in herself and doesn't show anything," he says. "That is a concept I got from my sisters."
The sensuality, even eroticism, of a veiled woman was the subject of 19th- century photographers. And even designers whose connection with Muslim coverups is oblique, can see the appeal of what Saillard calls "a certain elegance after over-exposure" and the idea of beauty as hidden, secret and interior, in contrast to what the 1990s dubbed "p*rno chic."
The irony is that in countries where the culture demands that women are covered, the robes are often in contrast to the extravagant sexiness of what is worn underneath and in private. Now, in the shopping malls of Dubai, the flash of a high-heeled shoe or the embroidered edge of fraying jeans has the same sexual charge as the Victorian era when "a glimpse of stocking was something shocking."
But those who know and understand the Muslim world are quick to point out that there is no single and absolute vision.
Sheik Majed al-Sabah of Kuwait, whose Villa Moda stores have brought international brands to the Middle East, says that Muslim countries have different approaches and that there are generational changes.
"Covering up is our culture and tradition. It is something we have always seen as a challenge when we first starred the retail business," says al-Sabah, who describes Lebanon, Syria (where he will open a store in April) and North Africa as the exceptions, because of the French colonial and Christian influences.
"I'm very proud of our women," he says. "I don't think cleavage and tight jeans are sexy. It doesn't keep the mystery of a woman."
Al-Sabah says that covering up has many different degrees. "My wife is Muslim, dressed between Armani and Prada," he says. "I have a couple of sisters who are very Dolce (referring to Dolce & Gabbana), like Beyoncé and Posh Spice. None of my family wears a headscarf or is covered up. But it is still Islam - how we were brought up."
Hussein Chalayan, a Turkish Cypriot designer, based in England, also says that it is important to understand that "not a single person is covered" in his native Cyprus and very few in Turkey, the country of his roots. He says that folkloric scarves, such as Yemeni florals, are mistakenly read in Europe as an Islamic religious statement.
Yet Chalayan is one of the rare designers to have confronted the issue of covering up in a landmark collection eight years ago. He showed women totally covered and then with the body revealed in varying stages, until only the veil remained. But he says that show was more about "how you define your territory," referring to a divided Cyprus, than a political statement about women.
Garen Demerdjian, 30, from the Paris-based label Gardem, is a French Lebanese designer, who spent his childhood in Greece during Lebanon's political turmoil. The collection he showed in London had the season's long, lean dark silhouettes.
"In Lebanon, women are not covered at all; they are very sexy," says Demerdjian. "I prefer to see women covered rather than nude. But the concepts of layering and leggings came from a different source. I am a painter and it was inspired by layers of paint and color."
Elbaz, born to an orthodox Jewish family in Morocco, which he left as a small child, says that he still carries in his soul the "the food, the smells" of Marrakech. He believes that the Jewish modesty of his mother and grandmother may have colored his view.
Designers are also aware that a modern woman's life is tough and that she is, for all sorts of reasons, seeking protection. Jacobs, in his magpie sampling of cultures, focused on the idea of nomadic people wrapping and covering themselves.
"It is part of our landscape even if it is nameless celebrities covering their faces with sunglasses. It is about safety, protection, comforting design."
Raf Simons, who famously showed an Arab terrorist look in his menswear show just before the Sept. 11 attacks, says now that it came from inside himself. "It was about an attitude of revolting and fear," says Simons. "I felt so fragile in the fashion world. I wanted to protect myself."
Saillard believes that an atavistic urge for "a sort of cocoon" is behind the need for covered-up clothes.
"People need to be reassured," he says. "There is a pervasive concern - bird flu and the disturbing feeling that the world is at war."
John Galliano's dramatic, disquieting Dior couture show, which featured Marie-Antoinette and the bloody terror that followed the French Revolution, was directly connected to the riots spawned by the grievances of immigrants, many of them Muslims, in the Paris suburbs.
Does Galliano, a deeply creative designer whose vision is so often a precursor of things to come, believe that his austere vision, with giant crosses worn like badges of martyrdom, is significant? "I am not a prophet," says Galliano. "But suddenly veiling is sexy - to evoke the sense of a woman. And often, when I look back at my inspiration, I find it really spooky."
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2006
PARIS The forecast for the new fashion season is as somber as it is certain. It is going to be a long dark winter.
After a decade of free-fall hipster pants, bared midriffs, bras on show under sheer dresses and naked legs, fashion has started on its great coverup. Forget girlie frills and celebrities flashing flesh on the red carpet. The typical outfit in the current international fashion collections is in any color as long as it is black with a silhouette long, lean and layered.
The mood is now for a chaste sobriety, with sturdy fabrics, thick leggings and even ankle-length hemlines.
The world's leading designers have no doubts as to where fashion is headed as they talk about "restraint" and "sobriety."
"I think 'modesty' is a beautiful word today - and a beautiful attitude," says Lanvin's Alber Elbaz, who has built his career on designing dresses with a respectful attitude to women.
Marc Jacobs, founding father of the girl-woman aesthetic, shocked the audience at his New York show last month with hefty knits, leg warmers and thick layers of clothes shrouding the body.
"The leg thing was a conscious decision," says Jacobs. "Early on I knew I wanted to show pants under skirts - and I didn't want to do pink and frills."
As Karl Lagerfeld, whose New York show debut featured entirely long, dark, layered clothes, puts it: "If you read the daily papers, you are not in the mood for pink and green."
Various influences are pushing fashion away from bare-it-all vulgarity - not least that there is nowhere to go but up from low-slung pants and strapless gowns. But among themselves, thoughtful designers are putting the change of mood into a different context, as they talk about the "Muslim-ization" of fashion. They are referring both to drawing, deliberately or unconsciously, on a culture of female sobriety. In a world clearly in turmoil, cocooning clothes are a response.
With the wearing of Muslim headscarves in school an abrasive issue in France and after the violent reaction in the Muslim world to the Danish cartoons considered disrespectful to the prophet Mohammed, few designers want to speculate openly about the influence of visual exposure to constant news reports on the Muslim world. Jacobs describes how his multicultural references included snap shots of Arab women with only eyes uncovered, but that he deliberately effaced the shrouded Muslim women in the corner of the collage.
"It looked a little scary to us because of what has happened in the wider world," he said.
As with any artist, the creative process of fashion design is complex. Lagerfeld said that he surprised himself by designing ankle-length white shirts, only realizing afterwards that they looked like a fashion take on Arabian culture.
"It was very strange," Lagerfeld says. "It goes in your mind and out of your fingers. You don't do it on purpose. It is about sensitivity and one cannot escape this kind of influence. It also has something mysterious, a mood of danger - something exciting."
There is nothing new about designers sampling foreign cultures. The caftan has been a staple beach coverup since Yves Saint Laurent, born and raised in Algeria, made it a part of his collections. Djellabas are considered vaguely exotic, but have never previously been seen as an overt reference to the Muslim world.
Many liberated westerners might be dismayed at the idea of fashion absorbing any form of dress that suggests the subjugation of women - or of discussing a subject that has so many connotations and overtones.
"We have talked about the Muslim- ization in fashion, but I don't want to be quoted," says one Paris-based designer, referring to conversations between himself and his partner. "I remember what an idiot Tom Ford looked when he raved about Hamid Karzai's robes, with all that was going on in Iran. It just makes fashion seem so dumb."
Muiccia Prada, an intelligent woman designer whose subversive aesthetic always veers toward sobriety, is not convinced that the Muslim factor even comes into the equation.
"It's a very difficult question," she says, saying that she believes that covering up is more about the eternal fashion play on "more sexy and less sexy."
"But we are in a very interesting moment," she says. "We have to deal now with a whole world connected."
Nobody is really suggesting that the winter 2006 shows are covering the body for political reasons, although Olivier Saillard, program curator for fashion at the Paris Musée des Arts Décoratifs, said at this week's Yohji Yamamoto show (where the clothes were over-size, body-concealing and with giant crosses, as for crusaders) that "fashion is much more political" than it was 20 years ago.
The Japanese Yamamoto, a designer of poetic, romantic clothes for a quarter of a century, said backstage: "I am very bored with tiny, sexy little fashion and with T-shirts and jeans - I want women's clothes."
Asked about the Christian symbol, he said: "I don't know what it meant. I don't know why I did it."
A visceral reaction to the ultra-sexy and over-exposed is often behind the change of fashion faith. Jacobs talks of listening to the singer Pink and her disc "Stupid Girls" - and then putting Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson in the context of America not yet having elected a woman president.
Elbaz says: "Fashion is about the moment, about what is relevant. Every day wherever I go, women are in charge. You cannot play with women; they are serious about themselves."
For a new generation of designers, covering up women is an aesthetic choice. The Belgian Olivier Theyskens, 29, the creative force at Rochas, was one of the first to practice a delicate restraint.
"I have always had a problem with vulgarity," says Theyskens. "I like a certain sobriety. It is above all a way of looking at a woman. I don't want to push the barrier of dignity. I think it is vulgar to display skin, although I like bared backs - there is a certain sensuality. I am not interested in sexy glamour. I want something more poetic and romantic."
Riccardo Tischi, 31, the designer for Givenchy has a similar outlook. His January couture show featured the ankle-length hemlines which gave a chic sobriety to his line.
"Everything starts from your background," says the designer, who comes from a modest and traditional Catholic family in southern Italy, where he is the only son among eight sisters.
"I think of fashion as emotion and the center of my life is my family," says Tischi, who lived in England for seven years and studied at Central Saint Martin's fashion school.
"People say that Italian style is sexy, but my woman never looks vulgar. She is sensual, confident in herself and doesn't show anything," he says. "That is a concept I got from my sisters."
The sensuality, even eroticism, of a veiled woman was the subject of 19th- century photographers. And even designers whose connection with Muslim coverups is oblique, can see the appeal of what Saillard calls "a certain elegance after over-exposure" and the idea of beauty as hidden, secret and interior, in contrast to what the 1990s dubbed "p*rno chic."
The irony is that in countries where the culture demands that women are covered, the robes are often in contrast to the extravagant sexiness of what is worn underneath and in private. Now, in the shopping malls of Dubai, the flash of a high-heeled shoe or the embroidered edge of fraying jeans has the same sexual charge as the Victorian era when "a glimpse of stocking was something shocking."
But those who know and understand the Muslim world are quick to point out that there is no single and absolute vision.
Sheik Majed al-Sabah of Kuwait, whose Villa Moda stores have brought international brands to the Middle East, says that Muslim countries have different approaches and that there are generational changes.
"Covering up is our culture and tradition. It is something we have always seen as a challenge when we first starred the retail business," says al-Sabah, who describes Lebanon, Syria (where he will open a store in April) and North Africa as the exceptions, because of the French colonial and Christian influences.
"I'm very proud of our women," he says. "I don't think cleavage and tight jeans are sexy. It doesn't keep the mystery of a woman."
Al-Sabah says that covering up has many different degrees. "My wife is Muslim, dressed between Armani and Prada," he says. "I have a couple of sisters who are very Dolce (referring to Dolce & Gabbana), like Beyoncé and Posh Spice. None of my family wears a headscarf or is covered up. But it is still Islam - how we were brought up."
Hussein Chalayan, a Turkish Cypriot designer, based in England, also says that it is important to understand that "not a single person is covered" in his native Cyprus and very few in Turkey, the country of his roots. He says that folkloric scarves, such as Yemeni florals, are mistakenly read in Europe as an Islamic religious statement.
Yet Chalayan is one of the rare designers to have confronted the issue of covering up in a landmark collection eight years ago. He showed women totally covered and then with the body revealed in varying stages, until only the veil remained. But he says that show was more about "how you define your territory," referring to a divided Cyprus, than a political statement about women.
Garen Demerdjian, 30, from the Paris-based label Gardem, is a French Lebanese designer, who spent his childhood in Greece during Lebanon's political turmoil. The collection he showed in London had the season's long, lean dark silhouettes.
"In Lebanon, women are not covered at all; they are very sexy," says Demerdjian. "I prefer to see women covered rather than nude. But the concepts of layering and leggings came from a different source. I am a painter and it was inspired by layers of paint and color."
Elbaz, born to an orthodox Jewish family in Morocco, which he left as a small child, says that he still carries in his soul the "the food, the smells" of Marrakech. He believes that the Jewish modesty of his mother and grandmother may have colored his view.
Designers are also aware that a modern woman's life is tough and that she is, for all sorts of reasons, seeking protection. Jacobs, in his magpie sampling of cultures, focused on the idea of nomadic people wrapping and covering themselves.
"It is part of our landscape even if it is nameless celebrities covering their faces with sunglasses. It is about safety, protection, comforting design."
Raf Simons, who famously showed an Arab terrorist look in his menswear show just before the Sept. 11 attacks, says now that it came from inside himself. "It was about an attitude of revolting and fear," says Simons. "I felt so fragile in the fashion world. I wanted to protect myself."
Saillard believes that an atavistic urge for "a sort of cocoon" is behind the need for covered-up clothes.
"People need to be reassured," he says. "There is a pervasive concern - bird flu and the disturbing feeling that the world is at war."
John Galliano's dramatic, disquieting Dior couture show, which featured Marie-Antoinette and the bloody terror that followed the French Revolution, was directly connected to the riots spawned by the grievances of immigrants, many of them Muslims, in the Paris suburbs.
Does Galliano, a deeply creative designer whose vision is so often a precursor of things to come, believe that his austere vision, with giant crosses worn like badges of martyrdom, is significant? "I am not a prophet," says Galliano. "But suddenly veiling is sexy - to evoke the sense of a woman. And often, when I look back at my inspiration, I find it really spooky."
... This is a fantastic and very interesting thread... this is something I just need to have a think about before setting ideas and opinions into play... can I ask you while I'm thinking..
.. what is your own opinions on this subject that you have outlined here?
...
...
...
