The Couturiers | Newspaper

The Couturiers

FRIDAY, 27 OCTOBER 2017 VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1

Chloé's new creative director presents assured debut

Natacha RamsayLevi encapsulates the myth of Parisian elegance with a luxe, feminine and effortless first collection.

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Model Binx Walton walks the Lanvin show at Paris Fashion Week: ‘Much of it looked like clothes teenagers might wear on a night out.’ Photograph: Peter White/Getty Images

Oliver Lapidus attempts to save Lanvin with first Paris show

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anvin is the oldest French fashion house still in operation. It was founded in 1889

by Jeanne Lanvin, a woman who smashed the glass ceiling almost a century before that term was invented. It is also a brand in turmoil, still reeling from the ac-

rimonious 2015 exit of their much-loved figurehead Alber Elbaz, whose luxurious draped and elegent ruffled dresses made the brand the toast of the red carpet throughout the noughties.

Since Alber Elbaz’s departure – which he said at the

time was the decision of Shaw-Lan Wang, the company’s Taiwanese owner and the creative director, Bouchra Jarrar, has been hired and, after two collections, has left. According to Reuters the numbers are as dispiriting as the personnel situation, with the house

reporting a net loss of €18.3m (£16.1m) in 2016, and a sales dip of 32% in the first two months of this year.

It would be an understatement to say that turning Lanvin around now is an enormous challenge. Arguably it is an unfair one to put

at the door of Olivier Lapidus, the brand’s latest hire as artistic director, whose experience in fashion has been relatively unorthodox – his CV includes running his own ‘e-couture’ brand and designing hotel interiors, as well (Continued on page 2)

Dolce & Gabbana show off brand’s heritage at third Milan show Collection, called Queen of Hearts, mixes 90s black corsets and Italian resort style with witty touches in this Summer/ Spring 2018 collection.

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pop-up show happened at the city’s La Rinascente department store on Thursday and at 10pm on Saturday night there was a “secret show” for its wealthy clientele. The cast included socialites and celebrity offspring, such as Kitty Spencer, Ella Richards and Christian Combs, the son of Sean Combs. The collection consisted of eveningwear designs includ-

ing floor-length tulle dresses, lacy gowns and brightly coloured suiting. It demanded the lifestyle – and the budget – of the 1%. The rest of the world could enjoy watching it on Instagram.

Sunday’s collection, meanwhile, was called (Read more on page 2)

Sense and sensuality: Dior embraces female artists while Saint Laurent sparkles Maria Grazia Chiuri doffs Dior’s beret to ‘revolutionary women’, with feminist essays and a nod to artist Niki de Saint Phalle, and Anthony Vaccarello takes a more sensual tack for his Yves Saint Laurent show.

(More on page 3)

Prada is sublime on the catwalk, but financial uptick is still to be felt Women dominate the decor and the soundtrack in spirited display of defiance by designer Miuccia Prada.

(Full article on page 4)

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(Continued from page 1) as a stint at Balmain Homme – and who presented his first collection, after only a month’s preparation, in Paris on Wednesday.

It was perhaps particularly unlucky that Lanvin was sandwiched between two breathtaking shows packed with luxurious clothes aimed at grown-up women. Before Lanvin was Maison Margiela, where there were deconstructed trench coats, cowboy ankle boots with diamante spurs and fluffy white bags fashioned after pillows, continuing an airline theme also seen in tags that hung from bags and from models’ wrists and coats saying things such as “Cabin Crew” and “Priority”.

After Lanvin was Dries van Noten, where there were putty-coloured slip dresses and jackets and dresses fashioned from silk scarves, boxy power suits overlaid with pretty tulle, and a gorgeous use of clashing patterns and richly embellished fabrics.

Lanvin’s show started simply, with the model Binx Walton wearing

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Image source: Irene Kim (http://instagram.com/ireneisgood)

Tokyo Fashion Week’s Biggest Party Belonged to Sacai x Undercover

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ne of Paris’s greatest cultural exports is the enduring idea that the city’s people, and its women in particular, dress better than anyone else in the world, and don’t even have to try very hard to do so.

That may be a myth, but it is a powerful one, and any brand that can successfully translate the dream of Gallic elegance into shoes, bags and perfumes has a very good chance of raking in the euros.

The new creative director at Chloé, Natacha Ramsay-Levi, presented a very convincing case for modern French style in her debut col-

ollaboration is at the core of what keeps fashion interesting, but it’s rare for high-profile designers to undertake a project together. The Sacai and Undercovershow brought two of Japan’s most prominent talents to the same stage, uniting Jun Takahashi and Chitose Abe for a runway experience that juxtaposed their Spring 2018 outlooks. With Tyler, The Creator and former soccer star Hidetoshi Nakata in the front row surrounded by actresses and influencers, the event was easily the

FRIDAY, 27 OCTOBER 2017

a black dress with a scooped, dropped back, her sleek, low ponytail wrapped in silver netting. But the looks that followed tended towards form-fitting silhouettes and leg-baring minis, and felt far from the modest shapes and “ugly-pretty” styling currently being explored by much of fashion.

Much of it looked like clothes teenagers might wear on a night out, which fitted in with Lapidus’ heartfelt explanation of the thought behind this “mini collection”. Speaking backstage, he said he hoped that by offering short hemlines while many other brands were producing long ones, he would bring youth and freshness to the brand, which he hoped would appeal to millennials: “Because they influence the world.

So this is a very interesting moment to take very old things and twist them and make them new.”

most buzzed-about of Tokyo Fashion Week. Delivering on its promise of excitement, via a retread of the looks that debuted in Paris presented with new energy, it was Takahashi’s first show in the Japanese city in some 15 years and Abe’s first ever.

The dual milestones made for a sense of excitement that normally wouldn’t occur during a repeat performance.

It can be difficult for audiences to muster excitement for pieces they’ve already seen on the runway or via social media, but the crowd at the Meiji

lection for the brand on Thursday.

Critics expected the new boss to bring a bit of edge to Chloé’s wafty lines, given that she has spent much of her career working as the righthand person to Nicolas Ghesquière, a designer known for his tough, sculptural designs at Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton.

She delivered on this front, combining embroidered blouses with Victorian necklines and ruffled silk dresses with a series of covetable cowboy-inspired boots with buckles and straps whose chunky heels confirmed the return of that noughties staple as a trend for next spring.

Memorial Picture Gallery greeted the collections with enthusiasm.

For Abe, the reaction was exactly what she’d hoped for.

Recalling the impact Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo’s landmark joint collection in 1991 had on her, she wanted to provide the audience a similarly powerful moment. “I hoped to give the younger generation the experience of the same impact I felt when I saw the 6.1 The Men,” she said post-show.

“The Sacai and Undercover collections are so different, and

I really hope the audience enjoyed seeing the contrast between the two.” The comparison served as the night’s focus, with the collections presented in opposition to each other rather than merging. In the hands of a skilled stylist, Abe’s fondness for fashion hybrids and Takahashi’s The Shining–inspired twins theme could have combined into appealing new outfits, but things were presented in largely the same manner as they were during the Paris collections.

Backstage: the Chloé label is best known for a hippyish feminine aesthetic of pastel colours and boho touches.

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Models at Dolce & Gabbana’s show in Milan

(Continued from page 1) Queen of Hearts and featured a backdrop of giant playing cards. It was based partly on the Italian resorts that those with a yacht would be familiar with – Portofino and the like – and partly on the brand’s heritage.

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FRIDAY, 27 OCTOBER 2017

The duo have been the purveyors of clothes to seduce since the brand was founded in 1985. Thirteen black corset outfits – of the kind worn by Madonna and Linda Evangelista in the 90s – opened the show. They were followed by designs more from the school of fashion wit – ballgowns covered in cabbages, shoes with Andy Warhol-like soup cans for heels, sunglasses worthy of Timmy Mallett Across 106 looks, food was a theme – but these were clothes for women who like to wear their biscuits rather than eat them. The finale underlined the heritage message. All the models re-entered the catwalk wearing corsets and Beyoncé-like big briefs. Appropriately, the singer’s 2003 hit Crazy in Love was playing.

Before the show, Stefano Gabbana said they had decided to go back to the roots of the brand because it was now relevant for a new generation. “All the new girls ask: ‘Why don’t

you do corsets again?’” he said. “But we play with everything … We need to go forward.

The embellishment and everything is a fashion. Black is a style.”

The constant dripfeed of new, ever more glamorous, shows from Dolce & Gabbana means the brand is an almost constant presence on fashionable Instagram feeds. This serves as a distraction from controversies such as dressing Melania Trump earlier this year, which saw Twitter users call for consumers to boycott the brand.

The 33-year-old’s first – after only three months at Marni – was met with mixed reviews. This collection was an infinite mix of styles, colours, prints and textures. The first few models wore short dresses made from panels of heavy satin in poster paint colours, with beading on the front, over long skirts.

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Female empowerment was a strong theme throughout Dior’s show.

Stella McCartney lays waste to disposable fashion in Paris

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tella McCartney has broken down barriers between high fashion and ethical fashion by straddling two worlds. Her mission statement is that clothes made from sustainable viscose and cruelty-free alternatives to leather should not be targeted at a niche market, but shown to hold their own on the Paris fashion week catwalk.

The invitations to this show were rolls of logoed eco-friendly, recycled and recyclable bin bags made from low-density polyethylene, stamped with the label’s logo. The designer’s

he careers of Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent were intimately intwined in the 1950s, but the megabrands that live on in their names – both of which presented their spring/summer 2018 collections on Tuesday in Paris – have developed quite different approaches to fashion.

This is not the first time that Chiuri has created a feminist T-shirt: the stand out item from her debut collection was the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quote “we should all be feminists”. Chiuri’s silhouettes tend to be straightforwardly flattering – a corset top nipped in at the waist with a layered tulle skirt – rather than the sort of awkward highly-styled designs that win critical plaudits at other houses.

She has received some critical flak for her accessible approach but has remained doggedly true to her trademark tropes regardless. Like those quotes, her brand message is straightforward, upbeat and globally digestible by fans such as those at the show who sat eagerly taking in their Dior berets taking photographs of the cover of Linda Nochlin’s essay and posting it on Instagram.

most recent advertising campaign was shot in a Scottish landfill site, featuring the models Birgit Kos in a camel jumpsuit on top of the decaying wreck of a car, and Iana Godnia in a green lace party dress prone on a bed of cardboard and flattened milk cartons.

The bin bags, and the campaign, were intended to encourage debate about wastefulness in the fashion industry, in which McCartney is engaging by using yarn made from plastic bottles retrieved from the seas by the Parley for the Oceans initiative to make a Parley Ultra Boost trainer and the Ocean Legend Falabella handbag. In partnership with the fashion resale site The RealReal, McCartney is also embracing the “circular economy” by encouraging resale as one strategy for reducing the 75% of clothes

worldwide that end up in landfill.

This collection was strong on the day-tonight staples the Stella McCartney customer wants. (The designer herself was wearing tailored caramel-coloured trousers with a toning crew neck knit, because “it’s work, and I have too much to do to get dressed up”.) The double-breasted blazer which is on every front row this season came with an elbow-length sleeve for spring, while jumpsuits, a signature of the label, came slinky and tailored or in a blowsier boiler suit silhouette. French taffeta evening separates – a puffball skirt, and a ruffled blouse – were pressed flat to drag them up to date.

“I’ve always done that with party dresses – take the lining out to flatten them, or chop into them,” said McCartney.

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Hyuk Oh in an Aeil T-shirt, Vetements belt, and Martine Rose jeans

How Hyuk Oh, the Korean indie rock star, is changing the sound and style of Seoul

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t is unfortunate for Prada that, in 2017, being compelling on the catwalk is like being rich in Monopoly. Sublime though the new collection shown in Milan was, with figures showing an 18% decline in net profit, what this brand needs is not applause but cold hard cash. Fashion weeks are now just one part of a huge industry where multi-platform success is essential. E-commerce, social media and partnerships with a ground army of “influencers” all matter as much as the show itself. Prada, one of the last of the luxury houses to embrace the digital age, is paying the price for tardiness.

But anyone who expected Miuccia Prada to be on the back foot due to the disappointing recent financial results does not know Miuccia Prada. Asked backstage whether she thought this collection would help the house finances, she was dismissive. “I don’t want to be judged by sales,” she said. “My life is bigger than that.

My job is bigger than that.”

“Combative” was how Prada described her muse of the season. Pointy flat shoes, sharp-collared boxy shirts and a straight-upand-down silhouette of long pencil skirts and

orn Oh Hyuk in South Korea, then raised in cities across China, he moved back to Seoul five years ago to pursue music. At the time, K-pop had hit a new peak (“Gangnam Style” had just gone viral) and seemed unstoppable. Against the odds, the four-member group Hyukoh (also the name he goes by as its frontman) formed underground in 2014, then became the first act to sign with HIGHGRND, an independent label from YG Entertainment, one year later. This year, they hit several new highs: Their first full-length album, 23, debuted this spring (“We’ve messed up, we’re fucked up, we’ve fucked it all up—that kind of mood,” he says). Then, the band embarked on its first overseas tour this fall—playing to manic crowds in Toronto, New York, Los Angeles—and after a brief pit stop at home this week, where Seoul Fashion Week Spring 2018 is about to begin, will head on to London, Amsterdam, and Singapore.

Hyukoh (the band) has helped pave the way for the emerging indie scene, which is gaining more and more ground in Seoul. Their sound is a refreshing counter to the high-octane pop and hip hop that has dominated the industry until now, and it is defined best by lilting guitar and Hyuk Oh’s singular voice—slightly husky, yet warm and full of feeling. What’s

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more, Hyuk Oh (the man) refuses to play to the country’s aesthetic conventions. His hair is black and cropped close to the scalp; his brows are short and vanish at the ends. There are ball bearings pierced through his Cupid’s bow and philtrum, as though they might connect in his mouth, and his sculptural face and slim frame wear more fashion-forward clothes—all of his own choosing—so wonderfully well.

Sitting down to tea at a sunlit wood-paneled cafe in the Yeonnam neighborhood, he seems nervous. “I’m shy,” he states quietly in English. He is wearing a fitted cap and a T-shirt designed by a friend, Aeil, that reimagines the Korean Air logo as Korean Wear.

Hyuk Oh is famously reticent, but kind, with a tendency to observe you from arm’s length.

He smokes, often, drawing a cigarette from the pack with fingertips calloused by his guitar.

There is always a sense of distance, but it vanishes onstage. You can sense that it is a place he feels truly free, to express himself through music and clothing in a way few Korean artists can do. It is thanks to the fact that he maintains all creative control over his image, which gives him the freedom to focus on his authentic, individual style.

slim tailored coats dominated the show, but the designer shot down as sexist the notion that this aesthetic was masculine: The cartoon connection was also a nod to fashion as Prada’s channel for communication about broader interests. When the designer noted that “through comics, in a light way, you can suggest very powerful things”, she was talking, surely, about her own job.

In January, the house unveiled a new strategy with the launch of Prada365, a new-generation advertising campaign dubbed a “continuous visual datastream” which jettisoned the two-seasons-a-year schedule in favour of fast-moving collaborations with photographers and models. Prada, the designer who once said she “didn’t like” e-commerce and “didn’t care” is now expanding into online retail. But any uptick is yet to be felt.

This year was supposed to mark the beginning of Prada’s comeback, but after the disappointing first-half financial results, its chief executive – and Prada’s husband – Patrizio Bertelli, was forced to admit that his turnaround plan “may take longer than expected”.

A model wears a pencil skirt with a boxy blouse.