The Spring-Summer 2023 shows wrapped recently and these were a few of the highlights.
Saint Laurent
Last season Anthony Vaccarello turned a corner at Saint Laurent, walking away from the hard, at times brash, sex forward work that defined his early career (recall Anja Rubik in that dress) towards a languid, melancholy stoicism. The death of his father earlier this year, and the new addition to his family - a child with his husband - in 2021 may have spurned the quiet reconsideration of his aesthetic journey; alternately current events may have necessitated a reexamination of the aggressive glamour of his previous work that perhaps lost the propulsive, high-octane drive for both him and his customer. Regardless of the point of departure the mature and discerning evocation of Fall 2022, with its sinuous silk, plush faux-fur, and tender, modest body covering has gently shifted to this current collection, still mature, and suffused with longing. Here the colour palette: muted olive, mulberry, camel, and navy paired with the filmy, sheer jersey renders a supple, blurred body; weighted with blouson leather jackets, or floor skimming trenches the effect is simultaneously taught and yielding. The draped capuche dresses, referencing Saint Laurent’s work in the mid-1980s (with more than a passing glance toward Azzedine Alaïa’s work during the same period) are grown, magnolious, the accoutrement of a fully realized woman who understands there are multiple ways to open the body. Beyoncé is already a fan.
Alaïa
Speaking of Azzedine, his graceful spirit has been carried through in kind at his own house by Pieter Mulier, now with his third collection and revisiting similar themes as Vaccarello: body (sub)conscious dressing, restrained womanly glamour, and 1980s power attire. Mulier’s version is less mournful, still complicated and mature: the gauzy jersey is here, made slightly more perverse with a dangling nipple piercing on the opening exit; the capuche is here as well, on wrapped tops, mini dresses, and white poplin shirts; the oversized drop shoulder outerwear makes an appearance and is by far the strongest element in the show. All of this is laid atop modernist heels, either made of lucite in the shape of ice blocks, or a sculpted pair of naked legs, referencing those made by Raymond Massaro for Alaïa in 1991. The finale, a sheer mesh turtleneck bodysuit with draped velvet skirt slyly calls to mind Alaïa’s previous work with exotic animal skins, like the Spring 2003 haute couture collection which featured a stunning tailored coat with a full glossy crocodile hide expertly placed onto the back. It’s often said that Alaïa’s work was void of vulgarity, that he loved women too much to ever subject them to such a degradation; however that final look, when viewed from the back, reveals the thong-cut of the bodysuit, with scant slivers of flesh glimpsed above the curved waist. A touch vulgar and all the better for it.
Shown in July along with the Fall-Winter haute couture presentations, and consisting of both ready-to-wear and custom pieces, and classified as Winter-Spring 2023 by the house, I’ve included this collection here because it’s the closest season.
Valentino
“Pureness as a conscious synthesis, the intentional removal of what exceeds,” spoke the show notes; pureness of craft, colour, technique, and the reduction of each. In a fashion show season that was marred by controlled viral moments and celebrity endorsements, Pierpaolo Piccioli and his team at Valentino returned to unalloyed glamour: minimal silhouettes, crisp embellishment, restrained colour. Diaphanous columnar cocktail dresses, minimal second-skin bodysuits, sequin-strewn catsuits (a micro-trend of the season), and wisps of ostrich smoke swirling from boxy t-shirts and gowns running the full gamut of nude shades. That Valentino red, a delight after the eye-searing brightness of last season’s PP pink extravaganza, made a brief appearance in poplin capes, canvas boiler-suits, and teardrop paillettes, bristling with insouciant energy; hits of sulphur, kunzite, emerald, and cobalt offered dense 3D beading and sequin étincelle an earthy root, grounding the fireworks. In lesser hands these forms could fail, yet it’s not simply a matter of skill but devotion, not just technique, but reverence. Who else would attempt bias, sequinned pleats on a tailored coat? An audacious deference to purity.
Khaite
With hair matted and frizzy, Catherine Holstein’s woman is unkempt, unkind, wild; in the last five years she has turned her label into one of the most desirable destinations for a certain downtown, hardened, New York woman. The films of David Lynch, particularly Wild at Heart, served as inspiration this season though the unwavering reliance on tough-girl signifiers like boxy leather and worn denim, mixed with rarefied uptown cocktail flourishes like fringing and tulle has become a signature, regardless of the point of departure. The strongest looks here were the long, mean, off-shoulder dresses, in matte knits or crunchy sequins, and the swirling fringed skirts, a holdover from last season, now fully actualized. When the two meet, in maximalist frenetic angry glamour, the warehouse lights flicker on and the night ends as it began: in stark alluring isolation. There’s an oyster satin trench or zippered leather bomber for the desolate walk home.
Olivier Theyskens
Since dressing Madonna for the Academy Awards in 1998 at age 21, Olivier Theyskens has been on the edge of what feels like fashion past and present in constant, brutal tension: the delicate, Victorian influenced collections from early in his career, the beehive cocoons at Rochas, the thumb-smudged blur of softness at Nina Ricci, all linger in memory. Since re-launching his eponymous line in 2016 Theyskens has mined the nocturnal, gothic mood that won him early fans, the kind of delicate tender clothing that feels so obscure and foreign in a current fashion climate, haute couture in sensibility if not official designation. As fashion has continually shifted more casual, more lifelessly chaotic, more flat and anemic, Theyskens insists on craft; utilizing scraps, off-cuts, fabric samples, and detritus from his almost 25 years in fashion to craft intricate, patchwork puzzles, each painstakingly constructed by hand. Bias-cut panels are artfully laid out, hand-sewn, and ingeniously stewed in a pressure cooker in Theyskens home kitchen to shrink and wrinkle the fabric, giving an erratic, micro-plissé finish, similar to Mariano Fortuny or Issey Miyake’s control and release garments. This collection, the third on a continuum, may not be Theyskens’ resolution, many of the gowns will be custom orders, fetching $25,000 at their peak, and it remains to be seen if he can maintain this as a business, yet this gently skewed focus on sustainability is brilliant, necessary both environmentally and mentally.
Bottega Veneta
“Perverse banality” is how Matthieu Blazy described the shockingly deceptive trompe l'œil pieces that opened this show; what appeared at first to be pedestrian normcore staples of flannel, chinos, jersey, and denim were in fact painstakingly printed and painted leather. This quiet obsession with minor details, quotidian lives, punctured the rest of the collection, primarily concentrated on daywear and easy separates. Blazy’s skill at teasing out soft perversion is highlighted in his curved-seam tailoring that creates an almost imperceptible rounded form to trousers redolent in profile of a gentle banana bend (and some of the trouser shapes Alexander McQueen was exploring in the late 1990s and early 2000s), which lends an off-kilter elegance to the body, telegraphing motion. Providing high contrast and continuing the theme of momentum are the striking abstracted jacquard knit pieces that disintegrate to marled fringing at the hem; these have a touch of Blazy’s former mentor Phoebe Philo, as does the preoccupation with oblique, glamorous women. The triad of kinetic fringed dresses that closed the show however, layered jellyfish tentacles undulating outward with desire, pulsed with a seductive energy that was all his own.