There was never much doubt that Alessandro Michele – one of fashion’s biggest personalities and a man with a passion for capes, hats, pearls, pleats, bows, ruffs, lace and embroidery – would take to the world of haute couture like a duck to water.
Michele became a star designer during his time at Gucci, but a new job at the house of Valentino has given him a shot at haute couture, the Champions League elite of fashion, where each dress is made to order with hundreds of hours of work, all done by hand.
The old Paris stock exchange was plunged into shadow and Prokofiev’s foreboding Romeo and Juliet ballet theme, Dance of the Knights, boomed into the darkness. Seating was banked claustrophobically tight and dizzyingly high.
A flame-haired model – in a harlequinned and crinolined, chiffon-sleeved ballgown that took the atelier 1,300 hours to create – took a silent glide across the stage, like the queen in a giant chess game. A guipure lace gown with a hood that was half-balaclava, half-carnival mask was followed by a scalloped and feathered silver gown under an ivory pleat cape secured with a flourish of duck egg chiffon.
Behind the clothes, a stream-of-consciousness download of Michele’s thought process ticker-taped along a screen: Emily Dickinson, Umberto Eco, synth pop, Marie Antoinette, Gustav Klimt, botanical art, Beverly Hills.
“I am passionate about lists,” Michele said after the show. “About trying to find order. My work is to imagine. My job is like trying to catch the ocean in a glass. So I am always trying to find order.”
Unusually, about half of the models were in their 50s, 60s and above. “Time provides grace, and it multiplies beauty,” Michele said.
Haute couture, in which dresses are worked on for months, is proof of this, he added. “The seamstresses are like fairies and elves. I’m not good at sewing, although I’m quite good with pins. But I have a passion that can make fashion into something meaningful. I can tell a story.”
Even Giorgio Armani made an extra effort to dress up for the Paris haute couture shows, with the 90-year-old designer swapping his trademark navy T-shirt for a double-breasted black velvet tuxedo. He then took a smiling catwalk turn at a show that celebrated 20 years of his couture salon, Armani Privé, and pointed to yet another successful red carpet season for the man who invented modern Hollywood dressing.
Demi Moore, an Oscar frontrunner in the best actress category for her role in The Substance, was guest of honour in the front row, wearing a beaded jacket with sculpted hips and shoulders and black velvet trousers. Moore, who wore a gold Armani gown to pick up a Golden Globe last month, will be top of every designer’s wishlist for next month’s ceremony.
Armani still has a maverick spirit. In the lavish stucco and gilt salons of a newly opened Paris HQ, Palazzo Armani, he cut through the fairytale froth which is the default aesthetic setting of haute couture with the sharpest of scissors.
Armani’s first love will always be a trouser suit. Sharp shoulders crusted with beading glittered like icicles in the evening light, with softly ballooning trousers caught at the ankle by spike heeled boots. All was hard surfaces and long, lean lines. Silk column evening dresses were worked with embroidery until armour-thick, while Fortuny pleats were wrapped tight and lashed to the body with glittering thread. The models wore their hair coiled into tight chignons, topped with tiny sequined beanies.
“Haute couture is where fashion becomes art,” said the designer, describing his references as “the shapes and colours of China, the landscapes of Polynesia … the opulence of India, the linear elegance of Japan and the decorum of northern Africa.”
Armani said the 93-piece collection was a wardrobe for “a modern woman who has travelled widely and internalised her experiences”.
Article by:Source: Jess Cartner-Morley in Paris
