Louis Vuitton Fall 2020 Ready-To-Wear

“I wanted to imagine what could happen if the past could look at us.”

Nicolas Ghesquière is the cohost of this May’s Met gala (since then cancelled) and Louis Vuitton is sponsoring the Costume Institute exhibition, “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” that the gala celebrates. Ghesquière took as his subject this season the exhibition’s theme: that fashion is a mirror of the present moment—but not any old mirror. At Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton, it’s a funhouse mirror in which eras, attitudes, and flashbacks intersect. And voilà: we flash forward.

This season Ghesquière enlisted the costume designer Milena Canonero, a frequent collaborator of Stanley Kubrick’s, to create a monumental backdrop of 200 choral singers, each one clothed in historical garb dating from the 15th century to 1950. It was a mammoth undertaking, and quite beautiful. “I wanted a group of characters that represent different countries, different cultures, different times,” Ghesquière explained beforehand. “I love this interaction between the people seated in the audience, the girls walking, and the past looking at them—these three visions mixed together.” The time-collapsing sensation was heightened by the fact that the song the chorus performed was a composition by Woodkid and Bryce Dessner based on the work of Nicolas de Grigny, a contemporary of Bach’s who never found fame.

Arguably, all of fashion is a synthesis of the past, but Ghesquière makes a closer study of it than most. He’s compelled by the anachronous. For spring 2018, he clashed 18th-century frock coats and the high-tech trainers of our contemporary period. Here, there was more in play: jewel-encrusted boleros met parachute pants, buoyant petticoats were paired with fitted tops whose designs looked cribbed from robotics, and bourgeois tailoring was layered over sports jerseys. Ghesquière seemed particularly taken with the visual codes of distance and speed—be it race-car driving, motocross, or space travel.

The biggest jolts came from the collection’s sporty parkas, because they tapped into the language of the street. Seventy years from now, or 600, in a tableau vivant of fashion, the early 21st century will be represented by these signifiers of our collective preference for the comforts and ease of performance wear. Ghesquière has long been applauded for his sci-fi projections into the unknown, but he’s just as resonant when he’s locked into the here and now.

We asked him what his hopes are for the future. “What I want is everyone to be safe,” he said. “This world can become a little more serene, that’s what I wish.”

Source: Vogue

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Balenciaga Fall 2020 Ready-To-Wear

Fashion conversations frequently eddy around how much people enjoy ‘immersive’ experiences, but when the audience groped its way into the darkened Balenciaga stadium and suddenly realized that the first two rows were inundated with water—well, that gave ‘immersion’ a hellishly ominous new twist. It was just the beginning of Demna Gvasalia’s procession of sinister characters, walking on a vast stretch of water beneath an apocalyptic sky rent with fire, lightning and churning seas. “It’s the blackest show I ever did,” he said.

Black: its resurgence, the cutting of new silhouettes, its links to minimalism and classicism, is playing throughout fashion this season. To each their own, though. Gvasalia’s route is always freighted with social observation on the state of the world, power politics, dress codes, fetishism. His intense parade of priests and priestesses in long black robes, with their “religious purity, minimalism, austerity” arose from memories of the Orthodox church in Georgia, and looking at the Spanish Catholic origins of Cristóbal Balenciaga. “He made his first dresses from black velvet, for a Marquesa to wear to church,” said Gvasalia.

“I had a lot of clerical wear in my research. I come from a country where the Orthodox religion has been so predominant,” he said. “I went to church to confess every Saturday. Back then, I remember looking at all these young priests and monks, wearing these long robes and thinking, ‘How beautiful.’ You see them around Europe with their beards, hair knotted back and backpacks. I don’t know, I find it quite hot—but that’s my fetish.”

More than anything, though, Gvasalia said he wanted to shift the parameters of menswear, so he could finally get to don some Balenciaga priestly maxi-skirts himself: “How come it is acceptable for clerics to wear that, but if I put on a long jacket and a skirt I will be looked at? I can’t, even in 2020!” But there were no two ways about it—on the runway, these men looked menacing.

On closer inspection, they were wearing demonic red or black contact lenses; their faces brutally augmented with protheses. “Religious dress codes are all about hiding the body, about being ashamed—body and sex is the taboo. Whereas when you look into it, some of these people are the nastiest perverts,” said Gvasalia.

Holding that thought—about constraint, rules and belonging to sects—set him off, designing neoprene suits with tiny compressed waists for women and black leather “Pantaboots” with padlocked “chastity belts” and a whole series of leather biker suits.

It’s telling that Gvasalia has been spending so much time researching Cristóbal Balenciga’s archive—no doubt in preparation for his first Haute Couture collection in July. Maybe some of what he called “our gala girls” in draped dresses with gloved sleeves and built-in leggings are a foretaste?

As for hope, despite the biblical apocalyptic scenario Gvasalia created for fall: “In spite of all that’s going on in fashion and the world, I still love this. I suppose until the day I die, this is what I am passionate about. I love making clothes.”

Source: Vogue

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Philipp Plein Fall 2020 READY-TO-WEAR

Philipp Plein felt bad about the two gold helicopters. Along with the two gold fighter jets and the gold sort-of Sunseeker and the gold supercars that decorated this stadium show space, they were props that had been commissioned late last year. “If I would have known what happened, after the accident, I would not have put helicopters there…. It was terrible what happened, but I couldn’t cancel the helicopters anymore. So I just wanted to say this.” Not only did Plein get that said preshow backstage, but postshow on the podium with Tyga—following a finale featuring Plein-logo, almost Lakers purple, Swarovski-encrusted, number 24 basketball shirts—he added that he was making a donation to the Mamba & Mambacita Sports Foundation in memory of Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna.

Say what you want about Plein—and we always do—his presentations are impressive. This one featured not only Tyga but also Jada Pinkett Smith opening the show, Missy Elliott in the audience (due to perform alongside Timbaland at the closing party), and a cast that was sprinkled with faces including Maye Musk (because PP had been in touch to try to cast Elon’s new truck but ended up casting his mom), Cameron Dallas, Bambi, and Gigi Gorgeous. Most impressive of all was that there were 3,000 people in the audience (totally immune to the coronavirus outbreak barely 20 miles away) holding up their phones and streaming it all to social.

The true motive behind all this hoo-ha was the launch of a fragrance that Plein has named No Limits. He hard-selled it from the podium at the beginning of the show and had said earlier that the set was an imagined landscape if you had a no-limits credit line. He expanded thus: “Women have a lot of ideas. They would probably go shopping. And guys would probably do what I would do. I mean, I think I’m a good example for being a little bit crazy, and what I would do is make a big party like tonight.”

The clothes that reflected this party were perfectly Plein-ian. They featured more tiny wannabe studs than a PUA convention. The emphasis was on gold—although PP says he’s a silver man—as a line in the sand to this challenge to Paco Rabanne’s domination of the balls-out, all-subtlety-barred fragrance consumer. There was some pretty good suiting for men and some half-decent (but still more-than-risqué) sequined dresses for women, and cool emoji embroideries on a fishtail parka featuring graffiti dollar signs.

By the end of this seemingly endless but endlessly entertaining show, you had to hand it to PP: He’s a democratic designer. What that says about democracy is another issue entirely.

Source: VOGUE

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