The Names of Flowers That Open Only Once
"There was earth inside them, and they dug." Paul Celan
To be both visually beautiful and hideous, harsh features refined and made elegant through tense contrast with delicacy, is an undervalued and intoxicating combination; the French of course have a phrase for it: jolie laide - pretty ugly - if taken further, a beauty that disturbs and unsettles, repelling and enticing in equal measure. Couturier Elsa Schiaparelli was one such irregular beauty, as were her clothes which she utilized to counter what she believed were shortcomings in her appearance, and created a starting vision of womanhood imbued with grotesquery that surpassed any inclination towards the natural. As curator and author Dylis E. Blum noted in her expansive retrospective of Schiaparelli’s work she, “can be credited, perhaps more than any other designer of the period, with putting truth to the statement that "made" beauty beats "born" beauty.”1 This insistence on constructing, on making, dates back to Schiaparelli’s youth; noting in her biography that she considered herself to be ugly, her striking features a detriment to achieving beauty, perhaps love as well. As a child, misunderstanding the way that children might, through displaying her future ingenuity she would plant flower seeds into her nostrils, mouth, and ears - in hope of waking the following morning with a lush garden sprouting from her angular visage. The experiment did not end well, young Elsa could not breathe and nearly suffocated; it would not be until her death in 1973 that the grip of earth would take hold and finally transform her. In life her need for a body reincarnated persisted and that desire, a prayer for forgiveness, would turn her from disciple to creator.
Schiaparelli’s history: her physical body of work, psycho-sexual rapport with human anatomy, and the (meta)physical desires of her childhood have provided a rich soil for current creative director of the house Daniel Roseberry, particularly in his latest haute couture collection. Amongst a slow moody procession, the body emerges: the second exit features a crêpe demi-cup corset with velvet ribs, paired to a taffeta skirt - the whipped bustle-back held aloft by a hefty gold chain encircling the waist - while the latter turn of a lace-up black velvet suit, the neckline edged with a human profile à la longtime Schiaparelli collaborator Jean Cocteau, is cut deep and low to expose the breasts. Both nod to her work in the late 1930s2 and the work of those who have since been influenced in kind; Roseberry has a marked skill at pulling from the high points of late 20th-century fashion and reflecting them back through a Schiaparelli lens, edifying the influence and impact she had on those who came after and further articulating the intense bonding that occurs through this transmigration of creative work. The collection also contains many a Christian Lacroix reference, like a fringed and sequinned amber velvet cropped jacket - itself a firm nod towards Schiaparelli’s habit à la française and traje de luces inflected evening wear - paired with an icy blue satin bubble skirt, the front section whirled into a dramatic Fibonacci sequence. The look is a sum of preceding ones: Schiaparelli + Lacroix = Roseberry, building on and reinforcing its own history; simultaneously the skirt at first and final glance resembles a rose in full bloom.
Flowers - “acts of God” in the words of photographer Irving Penn - are scattered throughout: hyperrealistic hand-painted silk and leather, oft edged in gold leaf and sprouting from the torso in a grouping of looks in corseted denim or sensuous draped jersey; one asymmetric gown in midnight velvet is cut open across the torso, a sunflower blooming from the nipple, and with it a landscape emerges. The aforementioned Cocteau jacket is paired with a dramatic hat and matching muff, both overflowing with dense clusters of wheat, or what appears to be - an haute couture illusion of ostrich feathers preserved with glycerine. This chimeric profusion of rural French life reanimated continues with clustered grapes either embroidered in silk or strung of pearls, a lavender tipped boater hat of similar preserved feathers, lustrous milky goat fur sleeves, and to-scale sparrows crafted from leather. Nature remade into adjacent nature and represented on the body is ancient, yet this desire for not only adornment but imbrication with nature, and the inverse of the body extending out into the surrounding environment through growth and protrusion harkens back to Elsa’s childhood need for rebirth at a time when she was scarcely born to begin with. The unsettling serves to highlight and further disrupt the “unclear boundary” that clothing marks “ambiguously,” in the words of Elizabeth Wilson.3 The murky boundary of the body, the hazy borders of the Earth, both traversed. These dazzling renditions of the Earth and its potential for signalling and maintaining life, pushing through and growing from the body, arrive when that ability is under threat by those it has sustained. Wheat production in France, one of Europe’s largest growers, has steadily dropped in recent years due to warming temperatures; one quarter of the house sparrows in Paris have vanished for unknown reasons; extreme heat has led to ‘stressed grapes’ and early maturation that will affect wine production in the region; sunflowers, notorious lovers of heat, are thriving.4
Further along in Roseberry’s collection multiple looks are accented with anatomical hearts strung on lush velvet chokers, and the finale of a red silk corset cut asymmetrically across the chest with a lacquered red heart pendent enclosing the exposed breast futures shimmering veins emerging into radicles. This motif refers to a design Roseberry created for the Fall-Winter 2021 haute couture collection, then a weighty gold neckpiece of tree roots indistinct from bronchi, again over exposed breasts; both highlight their respective primary organs and the distinct way veins or arteries are indistinct from plant roots. Sara Ahmed notes that “emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies”5 and emotions build and give shape to the interior structure as well, here building out a desire for transformation and sustenance in the face of impending collapse; where the surface and what lies beneath could potentially render itself useful for preserving life in new ways, permanently altering not only the physical contours of the body but shifting what the body might do in the right mind. Ahmed continues, “emotions are associated with women, who are represented as ‘closer’ to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement,”6 yet what else could the provisions of haute couture offer if not transcendence, the ability “to learn how to hear what is impossible,”7 or to borrow a phrase from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - become imperceptible?8
To dismantle fashion in order to become capable of continuing fashion, where the body accepts the mantle of both wearer and creator might be a future possibility; another is biocouture, a term coined by Suzanne Lee originally referring to the process “of growing fabric from naturally sustainable materials,” that has since expanded to include bacterial infusions, living fabrics, and biomimicry. Many of these lab-grown alternatives are biodegradable, able to return to the soil they sprouted from, offering a necessary intervention amidst extractive and dishonest technologies plaguing the current fashion production system. Others however intend to go deeper, unsatisfied with simply returning to the Earth and instead insisting upon their own interdependent fecundity. Some fabrics are infused with active bacteria that can behave, “like plants, absorbing water, sunlight and carbon dioxide to make oxygen,” and requiring similar care - gentle misting, considered sunlight, airflow - that might, in a far off future, develop into miniature wearable gardens. Other bacterial strains hibernate and move through fabric passively allowing them to come alive at just the right moment, like when activated by sweat, to trigger vents on the back of a garment to cool the wearer, offering custom habitats. That these items demand greater care and cultivation pushes against the current trend for disposable fashion and allows for more intense contact, beyond just garment-on-skin, permitting the wearer to “emotionally attach to a garment,” rendering a relationship and co-curation of the body, itself a miniature Earth.
Growing fabrics, recycling plants, and then stewarding their return may seem promising, and yet promise can often give way to terror, particularly where new technologies are involved, as control of innovations has traditionally led to more restrictions than originally revealed. Will these biocouture creations impinge upon their users rights, bodies, and lives in ways heretofore obscured? Specific bacterial cultures that offer life-saving protective abilities for disabled wearers may be heavily restricted by an intellectual property rights holder, who demands hefty fees; predatory contracts could lock wearers into agreements that render their garments useless if they are not consistently paying for upgrades; less reliable bacterial cultures could be foisted onto marginalized populations, creating discernible class differentiations in how garments are grown and how long they last, perhaps biodegrading before their time to ensure dependence, constricting while promising freedom. These new developments are necessary and optimistic mediations into both tech and fashion, yet the prior histories of both are riddled with exploitation, forced submission, and it remains to be seen if both industries will continue to struggle, allowing the promise of new lives to guide them away from their rarely acknowledged duty of care.
Technically these biocouture pieces are not haute couture, whose reliance on handcraft (and sustenance of statecraft) is multiple and legendary, though yet to include an insistence on fermentation, biodegradability, or bacterial suffusion.9 Haute couture is a requirement and an offer; an inherently exclusionary and restrictive system developed in Paris for producing clothing that demands labour-intensive delicate handwork - embroidery, beading, finishing - individualized patterns for each client, and multiple fittings, that in turn commands upwards of six figures for a gown. It was, for wealthy socialites, royalty, and those with extensive financial means, the only way of building a wardrobe and through cultural prestige - and legal designation - managed to influence women’s fashion trends in the Western world for over 100 years. “If haute couture shows today are calm and respectful, up until the late 1960s they were like religion, a cross between Easter Sunday and Holy Communion,” notes Robin Givhan;10 no music, no idle talk with seat-mates, the silence penetrated only by the soft graphite scribbles of clients noting models they wished to order, or the scroop of passing taffeta. In the latter half of the 20th-century that reverence faltered: the advent of designer led ready-to-wear, less restrictive social mores, and changing lifestyles fractured the hold haute couture had over the lives of wealthy women. Further instability: Elsa Schiaparelli closed her house in 1954;11 Christian Dior died in 1957 just 10 years after founding his house; Coco Chanel died in 1971 leaving her house dormant for over a decade; the retirement of Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1968, Hubert de Givenchy in 1995, Yves Saint Laurent in 2002, and Emanuel Ungaro in 2005, and the closure of Christian Lacroix’s haute couture house in 2009 triggered endless hand-wringing about the end of haute couture, and possibly the end of fashion altogether.
Injections of youthful, at times anachronistic, at times anarchistic creativity, like the appointments of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen to Dior and Givenchy in the mid-1990s brought new interest while articulating the fantasy led proclivities of the form in modern hands. The official governing body, Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, has slowly invited foreign houses and new designers who are unable to fully meet the strict standards of production required in hope of continuing the legacy,12 and while currently haute couture is a notorious financial loss for everyone involved, and the number of haute couture clients globally shrinks each passing year, the pull of history and influence commands deference. Due to rarity - of materials, vision, access - it now serves as a marketing vehicle bolstering less expensive and more profitable endeavours like perfume, accessories, and leather goods. Simultaneously it allows a current creative director (alternately ‘artistic director’ or ‘chief creative officer’ in the increasingly corporatized language of fashion) the freedom to initiate work that would be impossible within the budget and time constraints of ready-to-wear: an incubator of ideas and possibilities, new ways of wearing and being, new ideas of clothing and culture. Still a requirement, still an offer; haute couture, while diminished in scale has maintained its value, grandiosity and indirect influence on fashion, while the lack of relevancy in the day-to-day activities of women has in turn created a cultural idol.
In large part this worship is demonstrated by occasionally strict yet always respectful adherence to self-referential ciphers from the haute couture of generations past: the silhouettes, codes, and creators. Few couturiers in history incite greater veneration than Cristóbal Balenciaga; the abstracted purity fully realized during the end of his career allowed him to push away from more traditional haute couture shapes, as his clothing pushed away from the body itself. Less consistently preoccupied with a conventional bust-waist-hip continuum, typically achieved through corseting and designed to flatter and highlight the feminine form, Balenciaga’s work sought to abolish a coherent body form altogether. He worked with textile manufacturer Abraham in 1958 to develop an exclusive silk gazar that was structured, almost stiff, lifting off and away. This permitted work like the ‘envelope’ dress from Fall 1967, an inverted tent with bias-cut folds that wrap around the shoulders, refuting the mere suggestion of torso. Balenciaga questioned less what the body could do, rather proposing an obfuscation, nearly veiling it entirely. Scant relief was achieved via his erotic fixation on the neck, frequently opening the collar and setting it away to reveal collarbone or nape; and the wrist, with sleeves shortened to bracelet length leaving delicate touch points exposed. For his priest Father Robert Pieplu his clothing was “the reflection—beyond all distortions—of the Creator which everyone hides more or less in his inner self.”;13 for fashion critic Kennedy Fraser he was the “undisputed monarch”;14 for editor Diana Vreeland "he was the master tailor, the master dressmaker”;15 and for Christian Dior “the master of us all.”16
For the house of Balenciaga today the loft of silk gazar has been replaced with multiple new fabrications for new bodies, led by new masters: stretch polyamide made into shrink-wrapped bondage suits, replete with hood; rigid carved foam, whittled into hourglass blazers or mini dresses, overlaid with velvet or wool, a paper-doll’s idea of clothing; washed denim fixed into anti-fit jeans cut wide and suburban; and for the latest haute couture collection a new version of neoprene, rubbery and matte in appearance, developed by current creative director Demna, which he claims is his interpretation of the founder’s much loved gazar. Vacuum-sealed, sculpted, shapeless, spectacle. The opening looks of the show were cut from this inky neoprene: aerodynamic wetsuits, elegant flared dresses with gently peaked shoulders, tailored jackets and coats, all radiating severe black hole glamour, with the train on exit seven pooling behind the model like an oil spill. Denim is here as well,17 returning from its foray at the first haute couture collection under Demna, cut oversized and often made of repurposed pieces (a consistent motif), paired with boxy t-shirts, jersey bonded with aluminum, that can be custom crinkled by the wearer. The sculpted hourglass tailoring also makes an appearance, though the most violently attenuated waists are achieved through corseting and reserved for some of the men walking, including Demna’s spouse BFRND, who creates the soundtracks for Balenciaga runway shows.
The voice that opens the presentation, wafting from Bang & Olufsen speaker bags carried by the models, is that of BFRND detached from the throat; he read text into an AI robot who cloned his voice then recited a love poem back to the audience, “I love you. I’ve been loving you for 30 years. I’ve been waiting since I was ten.” The first two-thirds of the models wore ink-tinted black face shields18 by Mercedes-AMG F1 Applied Science, made of coated polyurethane and developed to create “an aerodynamic, anti-fog and breathable shield that can be used to optimize flow, improve performance metrics, and ensure a stabilized CO2 intake while considering the effect of temperature on fogging." These touches, aberrant on the surface - the effect of the poem is “uncanny” in the words of BFRND - emerge as cruelly prescient; Demna’s work is often coyly described as post-apocalyptic, an accuracy which fails to fully articulate the clairvoyant ability he and few others in fashion share. Spurring desire around commodities like luxury and exclusivity is commonplace, yet igniting a deep yearning for disconnection and displacement is to trade in the commodity of terror. Rather than just a potentially glamorous moment rendered in an haute couture salon one might find a legitimate future vision where love is forced into arms-length distance by encroaching fascism or planetary collapse, and where cloned voices will be all that remain of once human emotions, excised from the anonymized body.
Post necessitates traversing the apocalypse and while these tools of survival - breathable face shields, wetsuits, handheld communication devices - may signal an alternative way through to safety, they are still bound under the auspices of haute couture, and crucially the clients it serves. As the population of billionaires grow with each year, and the desires of those hoarding extreme wealth and privilege become more controlling and violent, their need for protection beyond just what the state can provide grows as well. Haute couture may now be ready to transition with its clients into a future devoid of galas and luncheons, instead providing necessities for future war-zones dominated by tear gas, underwater traversing, and surveilled communication. The duality at play - haute couture finery, survival - is emblematic of Denma’s high-low mix on display at both Balenciaga and the previous label he founded, Vetements.19 His clairvoyance, while honed, is at times infuriating as often his positioning is one of extreme ironic distance, as mass culture signifiers and genuine threats are ‘elevated’ into luxury consumerism through attitudinal shifts, conceptual positioning, and price gouging - this is the man who wrought an $885 Titanic hoodie after all. What might appear like a deviation at an adjacent haute couture house almost fails in its intended shock here, as the audience is primed to anticipate some type of titillating high fashion provocation.
In the footnotes for his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin notes:
“Distance is the opposite of closeness. The essentially distant object is the unapproachable one. Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult image. True to its nature, it remains "distant, however close it may be." The closeness which one may gain from its subject matter does not impair the distance which it retains in its appearance.”20
As the Balenciaga show progressed the face shields were abandoned and a cast revealed: character models, artists, and friends of Demna like Minttu Vesala and Eliza Douglas: fashion royalty Naomi Campbell and former Balenciaga house model Danielle Slavik; actors Nicole Kidman and Renata Litvinova; and reality television stars Christine Quinn and Kim Kardashian. Here the closeness of the cast, the physical closeness to the audience in the maison or those watching at home, reflects the actual distance - psychically, financially, politically - to those surrounding them, their unapproachability remains whether they are veiled and anonymized, or revealed and within arms reach. Kidman wears a silver coated silk-taffeta gown that in its perfunctory draping resembles an emergency foil blanket, and transmits as more mocking than strictly glamorous, while Kardashian’s ensemble is nondescript and as saturnine as her stilted walk. The specific clothing becomes irrelevant to the quiet spectacle and performance unfolding.
Kardashian wore an obfuscating bondage suit with hood - that in hindsight appears like an analog version of the haute couture face shields - by Denma’s Balenciaga to the Met Gala in 2021, which was contextualized by Janelle Okwodu as “completely obscuring her features and famous physique,” and giving “the reality star something she hasn't had in a long while: anonymity.” While she was theoretically anonymous on the red carpet in that the audience could not clearly see her face, her presence and influence was made clear, not simply because the garment completely failed to obscure her famous physique, but rather due to her mere existence requiring extreme deference and acknowledgement by those around her. She can be 'anonymous' and still be Kim Kardashian, made even more unapproachable through ostensible depersonalization that instead furnishes her with the individual equivalent of tinted windows, where she can look out to her audience, she is not surveilled but rather surveils.21 She has mastered another form of unapproachability in how drastically her physical form has shifted through extreme (and unacknowledged) surgical interventions that have remade her face and body into something not only imperceptible but completely unattainable, slyly reinforcing Dylis E. Blum’s claim regarding Schiaparelli’s work that “made” beauty beats “born” beauty.
Fashion, and haute couture specifically, are intimately led by the financial and cultural propulsion of those who patronize, who structure and give meaning, allowing itself to be shaped by desires of the wealthy and well-connected. An apocalyptic event striking the Earth may seem likely, even inevitable, yet it’s far more likely that the collapse of the planet will reveal itself slowly, imperceptibly at first, micro-stems barely cresting the soil, belying the deep roots extending hundreds of miles beneath the surface, growing through striations of fascism, surveillance, pandemics, and global warming. The cravings expressed at Schiaparelli - an ability to render one’s self capable of birthing a new Earth - and at Balenciaga - protection from both approaching disaster and an enraged underclass - both speak intimately to a current moment and need. It would be foolish to assume that the wealthy are ignoring these needs, only capable of articulating them through the mystifying language of fashion, as they are not turning their back on reality at all, instead utilizing the same exclusionary haute couture system that has served them well in the past, and kept them perfectly dressed for every occasion.
Dylis E. Blum, Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli (Philadelphia, Yale University Press, 2003) p. 153
The Summer 1938 and Summer 1939 collections specifically.
Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 2nd edition (London, Bloomsbury, 2003) p. 2
Daniel Roseberry accompanied this collection with a statement where he wrote, in part: “The pressure designers feel to make a statement about the current political situation, our ongoing climatic disaster, the inequalities among people of different races and genders, and an age of war has in fact led to some extraordinary work, not to mention a reengagement of our industry with the broader culture. But it's also led to a sometimes dreary self-seriousness, one that foregrounds fashion with sloganeering. It's easy to be self-serious.” I fully realize I am reading this collection both against and with the intentions of his work.
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edition (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2014) p. 4
Ahmed, Emotion, p. 3
Ahmed, Emotion, p. 35
Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
A full list of requirements is not available online, though this video by fashion documentarian Loïc Prigent, and Natacha Morice explains the high points in a humorous way.
Robin Givhan, The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History (New York, Flatiron, 2015) p. 13
The company has been maintained through to current day via perfume licenses and the acquisition in 2007 by Diego Della Valle and has returned to the official haute couture members list.
Iris van Herpen, for example, is an official guest house who utilizes 3D printing techniques in addition to handwork for embellishment.
Eulogy by Father Robert Pieplu, delivered March 29, 1972, printed in The World of Balenciaga, The Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogue, 1973, p. 12
Kennedy Fraser, Balenciaga, in The Fashionable Mind (New York, Knopf, 1981) pg. 81
Diana Vreeland, Balenciaga: An Appreciation, in The World of Balenciaga, The Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogue, 1973, p. 9
Much is made of the denim here and at the previous Balenciaga haute couture collection; some asking if it’s actually haute couture (technically not hand-sewn and therefore not) or appropriate (irrelevant) yet its also not new or particularly shocking. Karl Lagerfeld showed thigh-high denim boots, distressed like vintage jeans for Chanel’s Fall-Winter 2006 haute couture collection, and John Galliano spun out a shredded denim corset and dark indigo flares for Christian Dior’s haute couture collections for Spring-Summer 2001 and Fall-Winter 2001 respectively; although if one were to determine the first, Thierry Mugler’s Spring-Summer 1998 haute couture showing is a safe bet, nearly 25 years on and still a novel concept, continuously revealing itself as fresh and newsworthy.
The masks owe a debt in shape if not exactly mood to the Maison Margiela ones introduced during the mid-1990s and subsequently reintroduced for their first Artisanal (their version of haute couture) collection for Fall-Winter 2012. Those masks were beloved by Kanye West who wore seemingly endless custom variations for his Yeezus tour.
Demna’s previous invocations of mass culture include collaborations and unofficial poaching at both Balenciaga and Vetements with: DHL, GAP, Levi’s, Dr. Martens, Canada Goose, Eastpak, Reebok, Alpha Industries, Carhartt WIP, Comme des Garçons SHIRT, Champion, Manolo Blahnik, Mackintosh, Brioni, Schott, Hanes, Juicy Couture, Gucci, Kawasaki, Crocs, Vibram, The Simpsons, YEEZY GAP, Umbro, Tommy Hilfiger, IKEA, Lays, Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, Bernie Sanders, etc etc etc etc. This harkens back to 1990s skate/rave/club culture, where quotidian and mass brands were re-contextualized and remade into sexual or narcotic innuendos, however now the titillation is achieved through tension with low-market and high fashion. The more mainstream, anti-fashion, banal, cringe or cheugy a brand, person, or moment is, the more primed the fashion community is to accept it with an ironic, detached, sophisticated wink, while simultaneously reinforcing and invoking for themselves the down-to-earth practicality and authenticity that those who embrace it without reservations inhabit. This duality is suffocating and insufferable.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, translated by Harry Zohn (New York, Schocken Books, 1969) p. 243
Obviously this is not the intention or even unintended consequence of a bondage hood. Clothing context changes drastically depending on the wearer.