This just in: wearable clothes don’t have to be boring. On Monday, labels from Maison Margiela to Stella McCartney and Sacai played with ’50s couture silhouettes — think puffed up volumes and spaceship-shaped hats — rendering them in non-precious fabrics like denim and shirting. Meanwhile at Louis Vuitton, Nicolas Ghesquière sent out a bravura display of soft forms.
The Front Row:
You may have thought you’d seen ever celebrity who could conceivably be in Paris, but then when you made your way up the Champs-Elysées for the Louis Vuitton show on Monday and there were more A-list stars around than it was possible to count. Zendaya, Cate Blanchett, Gemma Chan, Alicia Vikander, Saoirse Ronan, Regina King, Jennifer Connelly, Chloe Moretz, Ava DuVernay, Cynthia Erivo, and the Haim sisters all sat within the Art Nouveau show venue suffused with soft orange light — and there were surely more.
The preponderance of talent in Paris on Monday made for some really fun FROW photo ops, like Robert Downey Jr. and Cate Blanchett clowning for the cameras at Stella McCartney, and Jared Leto and Paris Jackson looking like the Fashion Week cool kids in all black at Maison Margiela.
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The Casting:
At Mugler, creative director Casey Cadwallader put several of his VIPs on the runway. Angela Bassett, Paris Hilton (who also attended Stella McCartney with her sister Nicky Rothschild), and Fan Bingbing hit poses in corset-waist jackets and body-con dresses trailing miles long chiffon trains. They rounded out a stellar cast that included Helena Christensen, Amber Valetta, Paloma Elsesser, Natasha Poly, Mariacarla Boscono, Adut Akech, and Irina Shayk.
The Sustainability:
Stella McCartney has long used her runway as a platform for talking about sustainability. Yesterday, she gave guests an opportunity to join the conversation by transforming the Marché Saxe-Breteuil into Stella’s Sustainable Market. Models in crochet dresses made from seaweed-based yarn and blazers cut from regeneratively farmed wool carried vegan leather bags made with grape by-product from Veuve Cliquot’s harvest. They walked past a series of market stalls that explained these sustainable textile innovations, with the Eiffel Tower as a stunning backdrop. After the show, many people lingered to chat with the innovators, shop a selection of McCartney’s vintage picks, and snack on veggie burgers.
The New Shapes:
Stella McCartney played with balloon shapes, contrasting couture-like volumes with non-precious denim. (Bomber jackets were cut from upcycled silk taffetas and forest-friendly viscose satins, while the jeans were made with organic cotton and more seaweed-based yarn.) At Louis Vuitton, Nicolas Ghesquière — one of fashion’s greatest architectural designers — tried his hand at softer forms, like some great floaty maxi skirts comprising layers of mousseline and charmeuse that wafted down the runway.
Sacai designer Chitose Abe made fabulous cocoons and balloons out of denim and shirting. And Maison Margiela creative director John Galliano created wildly inventive silhouettes that remixed eras and genres, and included a new technique he named ‘pressage’ — drapes and creases laminated to create a bas-relief effect — and ’50s wide crowned hats and gloves. Coached by movement director Pat Boguslawski, the architect of Leon Dame’s SS20 viral walk, models lurched down the catwalk like a Funny Face photo shoot gone mad.
