Paris might be home to a legacy of traditional Haute Couture masters, but it appears that, lately, the city has become aware of its experimental, cutting-edge potential (If London had its own couture week, these might be its budding stars).
Here are six designers that would make Coco Chanel a tad restless.
Et, c’est la fin. On the third and final day of the couture shows, Jean Paul Gaultier said “Jai Ho!” while at Valentino, though they swore they hadn’t called Karl and Raf, Maria and Pierpaolo let the garden grow.
Couture, old-fashioned? Not if two septuagenarians have anything to say about it. On the second day of the shows, Karl Lagerfeld, 79, incorporated elements of streetstyle at Chanel while Giorgio Armani, 78, gave a masterclass in women wearing pants at Armani Privé.
While a more human-focused couture week is underway in Paris, there is a thriving canine couture scene here in New York, which is the focus of a new book due out this spring by photographer Paul Nathan, who schooled us on the world of couture-clad dogs, their owners, and messy photo shoots.
One of Russia’s favorite it-girls, loved by street style photographers for her Anna Karenina-inspired style, Sergeenko launched her couture line last season. The result was a nostalgic yet coherent collection.
This season, she continued to experiment with traditional Russian imagery, and decided to merge the Soviet fairy tale illustrations of her childhood with Civil War era Americana–specifically in homage to Gone with the Wind.
Click through to see the full collection.
PARIS: A pile of sand–dry, not the kind dumped on top of the icy streets outside–and a small forest greeted guests as they entered the Grand Palais this morning for the Chanel Haute Couture show. Sounds of birds chirping could be heard in the distance. A wooden walkway curved through this small pine and oak forest. At the summit of the climb was a semi-circular Roman amphitheater–the perch from which fashion’s elite would take in the collection.
In case you were watching a certain inaugural fashion spectacular on this side of the Atlantic and missed the first day of couture fashion week, here’s what critics had to say about the shows: Donatella Versace put the she wolves in chainmetal, Giambattista Valli toed the line between flora and fauna, and at Christian Dior, Raf Simons upped the ante one million flowers.
Long Nguyen is the co-founder and style director of Flaunt
PARIS–Donatella Versace could not have chosen a more appropriate locale for her Atelier Versace show.
She presented her spring couture collection at Le Centorial, a turn of the century restored building in the Bourse area of Paris which was, at the time of its construction in 1876, a revoluationary architectural project built by Gustave Eiffel’s firm. Old traditions met modern steel and glass constructions; the dome of Le Centorial rivaled that of the Grand Palais. So it was fitting that Versace’s collection was all about the interplay between structured garments and soft fabrics.
The ease with which designer Raf Simons has settled into his new role at Dior is remarkable. With his second couture show, he clearly demonstrated not only his firm grasp of the fundamentals of the house but a way forward.
Raf Simons’ presented his highly anticipated debut collection for Dior Couture last week (to rave reviews) but we’re still talking about it. We just noticed this behind-the-scenes video Dior posted of the flowers being installed for the show. Over one million were used. The installation process took four days, with workers shoving in delicate orchids Read more →
Raf Simons’ first show for Dior was over a week ago–a veritable eternity in internet time–but that doesn’t mean we’re tired of hearing about it. Alina Cho, CNN’s style reporter, was at the show and got some primo interviews with Raf himself, Marc Jacobs, Sidney Toledano, and Anna Wintour. We tuned into CNN International this morning to catch the spot and learned some new things like exactly how many flowers adorned the walls of the salons at the show (spoiler: one million!), what Anna thought of the collection, and why the heck Sidney Toledano et al took so long to choose a successor to Galliano. Read on for all the nuggets:
The haute couture shows wrapped last week in Paris, but one last couture collection made its debut yesterday. Dolce & Gabbana staged its first ever “couture” show yesterday in Sicily. The line, called Alta Moda, was shown to an intimate gathering of editors (Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington, Franca Sozzani), friends of the designers, former faces Read more →
