Paris Fashion Week: Day 4

Loewe’s London-based creative director Jonathan Anderson looked to the 80s
for inspiration as he had done with his own namesake label during London
Fashion Week last month. In Paris he showed modernist geometric prints
patterned across dresses layered over metallic trousers. Leather jackets, a
Loewe staple, came in classic slouchy silhouettes and longline overcoats
were presented in throwback pastel hues, worn with brown tinted glasses.
Perhaps they were a reference to David Bowie in the 80s as the Thin White
Duke.

It was ships ahoy at Isabel Marant, who referenced naval utility for her
autumn winter collection. Sailor shank button details on trousers, sweaters
and skirts were mixed with nautical stripes, utility jackets, gold cord
frogging, and epaulettes. Marant is an expert in dressing the urbanite
without trying too hard. There is alway a resounding ethnic influence in
her prints, which this season came in intarsia stripes sweaters and
outerwear. The silhouette focussed on the waist with ultra high-waisted
trousers and skirts accentuated with belts and those sailor buttons.

Yohji Yamamoto was on par with Rick Owens’ monastic inspiration sending
monk-like like wrapped dresses that were draped against the body revealing
Sak Yant tattoos at the neckline and face. Key items like blanket wraps,
capes and utility jackets were shown with a minimalist approach in
masculine tailoring. Hip-hop high tops juxtaposed the feminine velvet
styles and draped robes, but it was the draped silhouettes that made the
show.

There was madness galore at Maison Martin Margiela who showed bag lady chic
for John Galliano’s first ready to wear collection for the house. Models
made up with theatrical make-up by the exceptional Pat McGrath and her team
carried paper bags in what seemed like a dress-up game, accentuated by the
oversize strappy shoes. The clothes had Galliano’s sense of playfulness,
but were also sensitive to the codes of Margiela, who deconstructed
garments and proved their was method to the madness. The show notes read “A
fashion lo-fi: like Polaroids inflected with acid dreams.”

It was animal instinct at Christian Dior. “The idea had begun in the
couture, but here there is more wildness, savagery and overt masculinity in
the way a woman might present herself,” creative director Raf Simons wrote
in the press notes. “The idea of animals and an abstraction of their
patterns became key; none of them literal, more the invention of a new
species.” That translated into oversized tweed coats, coatdresses paired
with thigh-high vinyl boots, and jacquard jumpsuits. It was a “new kind of
camouflage,” Simons noted, which is perhaps why this was his most
commercial collection to date.

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