Paris met us with rain and a general sense of misery, with Parisians grousing about the upcoming summer Olympics. The cold weather did put a damper on things for the first few days, or maybe it’s just me developing a lack of tolerance for bouncing around Paris like a ping-pong ball. I love fashion shows, but they seem to be less fun with each season. The sense of community is often gone, with too many celebs, influencers, hangers-on, and stans making everything feel like a circus amped to the highest degree.
“Fashion used to be a subculture,” said my friend Satoru, while guiding me through the Rick Owens showroom,”and now it’s not.” I’ve been saying the same thing for years, but not in such a beautifully succinct way. Perhaps it is hard to grasp this today, but fashion’s audience used to be much, much smaller. Fashion is now mass culture, and we are all witnessing its effects. And when we wonder why so much of fashion feels banal, we must remember that in its glory days – whether you want to put it in the ’80s or the ‘90s, or the early aughts, it used to be the playground of the weird and the wonderful. Today it’s a Florida theme park.
One designer who took a stance against the circus and the attendant banalization of fashion was Rick Owens. Instead of his usual Palais de Tokyo venue that becomes a center stage for sartorial one-upmanship, he held three mini-shows – for the press, the buyers, and for friends and family – at his home. In his press release Owens noted that he’s taking a risk of alienating some of his audience – no one whose income depends on having an audience wants to feel exclusionary today. And yet he dared to refuse the narcissist fashion clown posse, whose members, in the final analysis, are only interested in themselves. You know this by their superficial relationship to Owens’s work. To them everything is a look, which I imagine deep down does not sit well with Owens, whose work is full of substance and meaning.
Though he sells expensive things to people with money, Owens has always been the champion of the outcasts, the outsiders, the freaks. That is the heart of his work and that’s why he is so loved by those who don’t find much love elsewhere. To forget this, to simply buy into the look, is a crime.
I write the above lines on the plane after having just watched Paris Is Burning, and the heartbreak of that documentary, of watching ballroom voguers trying to ease pain through glamor, is acute. And with this show, titled Porterville, after the town in which Owens spent his suffocating childhood, he took you through the pain of being the outcast all over again. The creatures he sent out donned deformed garments that reflected our deformed society that results in our deformed souls. Every proportion was twisted – in the knits with mega-dropped shoulders and elongated sleeves, in the leathers cropped to bolero length, in the puffers that turned models into Evangelion characters. This was unhinged beauty for an unhinged world, or one that Owens called “barbaric.”
In terms of sheer impact the rest of the shows paled in comparison. But there were some good ones. Lemaire was my first, and it was great to see another independent brand go from strength to strength. The quiet self-assurance of Lemaire’s work was on full display in proportions, layering, and muted colors. The Western motif that the brand explored with the utmost care was softly elegant and understated made me like this esthetic for the first time ever. They were a quiet, if untended, rebuke to Pharrell’s show at Louis Vuitton.
Lemaire’s challenge remains the same it does for all brands that develop a very clear signature – how to keep people’s interest with a style that is understated and does not allow much room for straying. Yohji Yamamoto’s show fell into that trap. It felt tired and listless. The attempts to stray away from his signature style – like the vest look worn by the actor Norman Reedus – looked incoherent. Along with Reedus, Yamamoto’s buddies, the director Wim Wenders, who has done a seminal documentary on the designer, and the musician Warren Ellis (Nick Cave’s music partner), walked the show as well. It was lovely, but I wonder if all the rappers in the front row cared.
From the low of Yamamoto it was to the high of Dries. Van Noten put on a sublime show of elegant tailoring spiced by an occasional leather top or long black leather gloves. I’ve always wondered why more designers don’t use gloves in shows – it’s an easy instant upgrade.
The music at Junya Watanabe’s Friday morning show was elegiac – in general from the shows I attended the music was putting me in a reflective mood – though the clothes were less so. The super long coats were a combo of a suit jacket and pants spliced together. It could have worked in theory, but in most iterations it felt gimmicky. Perhaps counterintuitively, the capes, with non-functioning sleeves sewn to the sides of the capes, felt less so, but I commend anyone who decides to rock one in real life.
The Comme des Garçons show, on the contrary, was not only strong but the clothes were wearable. This felt strange, since we are so used to Kawakubo dispensing with all notions of wearability – let alone comfort – on the runway. The serene white of the tailoring signaled Kawakubo’s shift towards the light (the world is truly upside down), but what felt fresh was the tightness of the jackets in the milieu where the oversized Balenciaga fake raver / fake vintage look still reigns supreme (the tell is to hang around the Marais during fashion week to see what fashion people wear). I examined it all carefully at the Comme showroom, and many of the jackets have two closures to give them two proportions – extra-Slimane and Slimane – but you’ll still have to be skinny to fit into most of them. Sorry.
On Saturday morning I went to the Y-3 showroom and saw a new project that I can’t wait to tell you about! Then it was on to Kolor, which was somewhat of a letdown. The Carhartt-esque workwear that Junichi Abe proposed, complete with ready-made rips, felt unconvincing and forced.
Then it was off to Hermés, where Veronique Nichanian put on a show of self-assured splendidness that said exactly what it needed to say – that in terms of quality and craftsmanship the brand she designs for sits firmly at the top of fashion’s food chain, looking down at LVMH’s and Kering’s stable of fake luxury brands as they scramble to rearrange themselves following the demise of the aspirational consumer.
It does feel special to behold such quality as Hermés produces, especially in leather. I dutifully pet everything at the showroom, even though the clothes oozed quality on the runway, which is not an easy feat. The grain leather coats lined in wool were a particular standout, as was a smooth black leather blouson with a baseball collar.
My last show was Sacai, and Chitose Abe delivered another excellent collection. If it wasn’t as powerful as the homerun she produced in September during women’s, it was because she continued to explore the same oversized-sleeve silhouette. Suffice it to say that even a solid Sacai show is better than many others.
This season I visited more showrooms than usual. And this is our resolution for 2024 –StyleZeitgeist will be supporting more small designers. That is not because I have soured on the big ones. But much as we love them, Dries Van Noten and Sacai hardly need our help. Smaller brands do.
Here is the most simultaneously elating and depressing thing. On this trip I have seen more excellent clothes than ever from small brands. Brilliant, thoughtful, well-made garments that would shine in anyone’s closet. But where is the customer for them? Where are the shops and the magazines who will support them? In the sea of fake luxury, where a handful of brands rake in most of the money peddling subpar goods to the ignorant masses, these brands need our support more than ever.
So, here they are, starting with some labels that have been core to StyleZeitgeist since its inception.
Forme d’Expression collection was lovely, with proportions that somehow managed to have both ease and strictness. Their fabrics are some of the best I’ve handled. A particular standout was a mac coat made of wool / cotton / metal mix. The fabric elevated the deceptively simple garment into a subtle head-turner.
m.a.+ by Maurizio Amadei was back with an excellent collection of leathers and tailoring. I don’t know how they manage to do it, but m.a.+’s A-line coat silhouette is best in class, as are their boots and leather bags, which possess that luxurious feeling with the polish taken off. It’s the kind of elegance with an edge I keep harping on.
Luca Laurini of Label Under Construction was also back with a collection of innovative knitwear and knit tailoring. There was a suit made from a cashmere / wool / silk mix that felt so luxurious and comfortable that I wanted to immediately steal it off the hanger.
Jan Jan Van Essche continued with his multicultural take on modern dress with easy proportions and lovingly sourced natural materials that often come from Japan. Also at Jan Jan’s showroom, the jewelry designer Stephanie Schneider showed her crocheted chain bracelets and necklaces whose delicate beauty trumps much of what’s out there.
Sono, the brand I discovered a year ago, also presented a quietly beautiful collection of soft, easy tailoring and knitwear of baby alpaca and Tuscan wool. There were hand-knit cardigans and sweaters, a sublime overcoat and a matching long tailored vest. The brand keeps sourcing some of the nicest materials I’ve ever laid my hands on.
There were a couple of great brands that I discovered at the MMW showroom, curated by Andreas Murkudis, whose store in Berlin is one of the best in the world, and whose taste I’d trust in just about everything. Suzusan – a Japanese brand that I discovered several months ago at Van Essche’s Antwerp store Atelier Solarshop – does mind-blowing shibori dyeing on cashmere sweaters, scarves, and blankets. The house is on its fourth generation of shibori artisans and the level of skill shows.
Yindigo AM, also from Japan, deserves a special mention, too. I don’t even know how to begin to describe the level of quality of her work. Cotton that feels like silk. Wool that feels like silk. Silk that feels like silk. Cashmere that evoked that Proustian madeleine feeling, taking me back to the time when I could not get over the softness of Jil Sander’s cashmere back in 1999.
Another standout brand at MMW was Tsatsas, a bag-maker from Germany. The couple that designs the brand are architects and that type of functional, two-to-three-dimensional thinking showed. I was particularly impressed with the suitcase Tsatsas designed with David Chipperfield. It was a suitcase in the full sense of the word, especially designed to fit a suit, complete with an embedded leather-wrapped hanger. The bag first designed by Dieter Rams for his wife was also cool, as was much of the bag range (and if you ever want to treat yourself to a nice toiletry kit, look no further).
There were also a couple of interesting lines at Showroom Tokyo, which is charged with promoting Japanese fashion designers. I quite liked the whimsy knitwear from Kota Gushiken, the inside out jackets and bleached denim from Soshio Tsuki, and the easy, oversized tailoring from Irenisa.
But perhaps my best discovery this season was a brand called K’ang, by a young Korean designer Juyoung Kang, who spent years working for DEEPTI and m.a.+. That school shows in the sharp edge of his tailoring. His single- and double-breasted overcoats were masterful, as were his dress shirts, and a cold-dye denim jacket and jeans that made me want to throw out all of the denim currently in my closet.
And that is it. It was a good season overall, with plenty of fantastic clothing, if you knew where to look.
