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Great article in today's NYT by Cathy Horyn. I agree with her on Raf and Hedi, and especially on menswear as becoming the driving force behind 21st century fashion. Funny how an arena that was once merely about suits and dress shirts is now so much more.
Where the Boys Are Is Where the Girls Should Be
By CATHY HORYN
Published: February 1, 2005
PARIS, Jan. 31 - Only when you see the men's wear collections of Hedi Slimane at Dior and Raf Simons do you realize how inept women's fashion is at reviving itself. The designers of women's clothes receive most of the attention, yet it is squandered on third-rate talents, clichés of femininity, and actresses frightened into submission by silly television frock pundits. If you want to know what's new in fashion, what's exciting, ask the boys.
Mr. Simons and Mr. Slimane, both in their 30's, brought so much energy to the fall 2005 men's collections that they deserve to be seen by a wider audience. That means doing women's clothes. Dior has John Galliano, but LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the parent company of Dior, should give Mr. Slimane his own label. Mr. Simons, who is one of the great, underused talents in fashion, would not confirm a report today that he is in negotiations with Prada to design Helmut Lang. LVMH had a chance to put him at Celine, instead of the clumsy Roberto Menichetti. That was a mistake, though maybe not for Mr. Simons.
This collection showed Mr. Slimane at his most confident as he mined the London music scene for both inspiration and androgynous, skinny models, their faces ghoulishly pale except for a slick of black eyeliner and glitter shadow. The look recalled Keith Richards in the early 1970's, but the cut of the clothes - the postromantic flourish of a long scarf or a polka-dot chiffon shirt with a soupy bow under a pinstripe blazer - was as contemporary as any style can be without being a moment too soon or late.
He opened the show with a young man in a pair of tight black jeans with gold stacked-heel shoes and a salt-and-pepper herringbone cape. And as Karl Lagerfeld, who was seated between Kate Moss and Yoko Ono, said afterward, "I don't normally like capes." Well, there are at least a dozen reasons you would avoid a man in a cape. But Mr. Slimane's capes looked right because they were square on the shoulders like a suit jacket and close to the body. Later he showed one in a hand-knit style with long fringe.
He was also a lot freer with this collection, showing suits in different proportions (but also not taking them too seriously) and offering a lot of great individual pieces like ruffled chiffon shirts frayed at the edges and glitter pants worn with glen plaid blazers. Above all, the clothes would look sexy to a man or a woman. As Jay Jopling, the owner of the White Cube Gallery in London, said as the models streamed past in their Byron scarves, "This is how everyone was dressed at Kate Moss's birthday party."
In some ways, Mr. Simons's collection was the more mature of the two. It had the weight of manhood. Mr. Simons called the show, which marked his 10th anniversary in fashion, "All Shadows and Deliverance, History of My World." And it was his history and no one else's, beginning with his sharp skinny suit and now the newer proportion of a cropped jacket and full trousers. To these he added beautiful topcoats in charcoal wool and tweed. And with both suits and slim pants he showed a black, multistrap boot taken from a 19th-century hiking style. It, too, lent a sense of emotional ballast to the collection.
If Mr. Simons's superb spring collection was an attempt to imagine the future in a believable way, this one was about being grown up. "I try to go more and more away from clothes with references," he said. "I used to make collections that were so obviously hippie or new wave. But now I'm more interested in developing an idea and then slowly letting it float to the next thing."
Tailoring and fresh proportions was the big story of the Paris shows. Stefano Pilati loosened the fit of suits at Yves Saint Laurent, adding the extra polish of waistcoats and shirts with French cuffs. In an inventive Comme des Garçons show given at the Bon Marché department store, with Saturday shoppers gawking over the barricades, Rei Kawakubo did tailored suits in sports fabrics like black nylon. They looked especially cool as slim tuxedoes in a matte black fabric with frilly and pin-tucked white shirts. More and more what distinguishes Paris fashion from its sister cities is the individual mind. It is at its most liberated in the wide trousers and battle jackets of Mr. Simons. Who else in fashion has attempted to change proportions so willfully and in a way that at least makes you think about it?
Mr. Galliano has also gone to extremes with his proportions, and while the results are sometimes outlandish, they are not without wit. He took his Napoleonic theme - tricorns crumpled into trapper's hats, supersize down coats - and blew it up into a kind of Abel Ganz spectacular. Underneath everything, though, were plaid trousers and satchel-pocket sweatshirts that seemed targeted to the trendiest Japanese teenager.
Junya Watanabe's show was an astute take on the influence of snowboarders. But rather than mimic their style with more fuzzy hats, he advanced it, picking up on the gray pinstripe outerwear that Burton had in its winter line and giving it a more polished street look. Some snowboarders are now wearing old Harris tweed jackets with oversize turtlenecks. Mr. Watanabe finessed that idea, too, with chunky sweaters, down vests with tweed sections and tailored down blazers.
At Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs gave editors planning homage pages to Rudolf Nureyev another wrinkle of astrakhan. The show seemed mainly a Russian theme attached to some clothes. Make that, great accessories, including tapestry travel bags and fur mufflers with the LV logo roughly the size of your billfold when it's opened.
Dries van Noten's evocation of a literate, simple life in Russia in the 70's, with the models' boots clicking on a tile floor as two narrators read passages from Paul Auster, nicely expressed the designer's love for modern clothes with a sense of history. The collection touched on the rural and the urban, with muddy English tweeds, Jacquard Shetland sweaters and terrific motorcycle pants in wool and leather. And at Paul Smith there was not only a boss look to the tailoring - tougher, closer to the body - there was also a commensurate urban sexiness, felt in the python jeans and heavy scuffed boots.
The houndstooth and glen plaid mixes at Hermès looked overly studied. On the whole the collection seemed out of step. And with the Paris men's shows signaling a shift in proportions, Yohji Yamamoto needs to knock the dust out of his shapeless, gnomish suits. It's high time to move on.
