10 Reads On The Good Ship Cruise

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, began Charles Dickens, when he was telling tales of two cities rather than four. But the premise is the same when it comes to the pre-collections, a daunting biannual round of seasons crystallising before our very eyes. To some – retailers, shoppers, certain Air Miles-hungry members of the press – they are the best of times. They offer an easy, breezy and, most importantly, early drop of commercially minded garments, free from heavy fabrics or highfalutin seasonal statements. To others – designers and, again, some members of the press – they are symptomatic of the current issues plaguing fashion: a lack of time and a voracious, insatiable demand for the new, a focus on commerce (that word again) above creativity, and more clothes than we know what to do with. But these mid-season ranges have existed for decades, and their importance only seems set to grow.

Pre-collections were originally about satisfaction on the shop rail rather than in the design studio. They were about filling clients’ wardrobes with easy basics between the main spring/summer and autumn/winter fashion collections, nothing to write home about or make a fuss over, hors d’oeuvres to the main course of the catwalk collections. Today, the tables have turned. “Cruise is our most important collection,” stated Michael Burke, the CEO of Louis Vuitton, at a lunch held before Nicolas Ghesquiere’s inaugural pre-collection show for the house (Miuccia Prada held a dinner post-show, Dior and Chanel had cocktails. It’s all very civilised). Then he corrected himself: “It’s everybody’s biggest collection.” Indeed, houses estimate that pre-collections form 60-85% of their overall sales. Their importance is not to be sniffed at.

That is possibly why the fashion press ended up skipping from terminus to terminus across the summer, seeing shows and clothes from a host of the industry’s finest off the official schedule, and off the beaten track. There was a fully fledged fashion week in all but name staged in New York in May, opened by Raf Simons’ show for Dior and including small-scale presentations by designers as varied as Stella McCartney, Calvin Klein, Altuzarra, Alber Elbaz’s Lanvin and Alexander Wang – for his own label and Balenciaga. And Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu unofficially closed the season in July in Paris, just 24 hours before the first of the winter haute couture shows.

In between were jaunts to Dubai and Monte Carlo, both billionaire bastions where pre-collections do swift business stuffing trunks to be hauled onto the yachts moored in their respective bays. And, in a rather literal twist, boats were ever present. Dior ferried us across the East River aboard one decked out in the house’s signature grey toile; Chanel enlisted wooden abras to chug over to The Island, where they were staging their show. And Paris… well, Paris has the Seine. Plus we cruised on Eurostars and planes for Miu Miu, and that’s the way most cruisers who actually wear these clothes are travelling today – at 35,000ft.

The most striking element, for me, was that all four labels addressed head-on the demands of cruise, commercial, but also creative. In fact, they were each inspired in some way by the very notion of these collections – the reason they came about, and the reason they’re so important. “This is, for me, a look that can translate for everybody in the world, especially with the travelling,” said Karl Lagerfeld, the patron saint of the cruise show. “It’s a cruise collection.” Regardless of where or how we cruised, or the label sewn in the back of these clothes, that fact was never forgotten.

Photographer: Juergen Teller

By Alexander Fury

Shopping cart0
There are no products in the cart!
Continue shopping