September 11, 2024 |
Couture is monumental. The clothes are meant to blow you away. Each look has taken anything from seven days to more than a month to make. It is painstaking. Perhaps 70+ petites mains have worked together to create the most intricate of pieces. We shall come back to intricate later. As my train pulls into Gare du Nord, packed as it is with English and French tourists and a smattering of journalists, the season begins.
We are here, it must be said, during a cracking mini heatwave in mid-June, for haute couture AW24, the heartland fashion Olympics. This quite simply is the best of the best. The couture designers are the top athletes, gymnasts and pole vaulters of fashion. They are superhuman – clever, accomplished and breathtakingly good at leading an expert team.
Expectations are high. Paris is already in a state of semi-lockdown as it prepares for the other Olympics. Roads are closed, cars are backed up, sweet chaos reigns and everyone has an opinion on how they will be leaving town. The Parisians are nonchalant, unperturbed it seems, and getting out as soon as possible. My taxi driver explains, “We are a nation with a glass half-empty.” Having lived in Sydney, which hosted the Olympics in 2000, I saw how the power of community overwhelmed everyone. The Parisians will come to see that too.
An armful of pink peonies is waiting at the hotel. The card reads, “Dear Alison, I look forward to seeing you at the couture show, love Demna.” Balenciaga knows how to send a ticket with a certain style. There is nothing quite like the tactile reality of a beautiful printed invitation with its handwritten wishes. This is a world of made- by-hand excellence that begins with the designers, their wildest thoughts and wonderful ideas, and eventuates with the customers, a playground of 10 fittings or more for a wedding dress. Time slows down in Paris.
Monday
Iris van Herpen is holding a couture installation at a newly refurbished gallery on Boulevard Haussmann. She is a designer who is continually exploring the future, pushing the spectacular. Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses – the blockbuster exhibition of her work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs earlier this year – underscored her commitment to art and nature, and this latest couture collection is imbued with a blossoming, a weightlessness of natural forms and spirituality. Properly incredible, these are the fluctuations of her mind as the ‘sculptures’ are accompanied by five models suspended – as if by magic – on the gallery’s walls. Coco Rocha, quivering in gold, is a living artwork moving slowly, with an almost Japanese ceremonial quality to the folding and draping of her dress. The intention, van Herpen says, is to invite the audience to experience the clothes up close and appreciate the beauty and artistry of the craftsmanship. It is an otherworldly moment. This is the week when the jewellers roll out their splendour, too. Hermès is presenting its high jewellery collection at the Musée du Louvre, where we are plunged into darkness, focusing the mind’s eye on the priceless pieces. Pierre Hardy, creative director of Hermès high jewellery, has been experimenting with perceptions of light, “capturing intangible colour”. In the pitch-blackness of the gallery, the emerald-cut white diamonds and sapphires radiate shimmer; pure fragile rays of colour send out delicate light waves; precious cut stones blister alongside triangle-cut diamonds. This is a deep dance in a highly specialised world. The petite Sac Bijou (a fully functioning, fully bejewelled bag) is glowing, refracting white gold diamond brilliance, set with yellow, blue and pink sapphires, spessartite garnets, aquamarines and amethysts. The Horse Bracelet is a wonder of rose gold set with many goodies.
After the intensity of this pleasure palace we take a walk down the Rue de Rivoli, past the gilded Joan of Arc statue and across the Seine – the only way to see Paris at its summer’s finest. The Musée Rodin is the venue for Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior. In the lap of Rodin’s sculptures, all marble kisses, we take in 61 looks inspired by the Olympics and ancient Greece. Her ethos is all about female empowerment and we admire the strength of these Athenaeum dresses, which are softly draped in gold lamé chiffon, micro-dipped by hand, the bodysuit with its cascade of lacquered golden rooster feathers. The collection has a grace. Dior doubled down. A big hitter. Opening-ceremony stuff.
The week is a cultural odyssey: late nights at La Belle Epoque at Tony’s table; a sancerre and citron pressé. People drop by every night to join in, gossip on the shows of the day and speculate about who is going where. The latest rumour is that Sofia Coppola will replace Virginie Viard. Pffhh.
Tuesday
Gucci high jewellery in Place Vendôme is awash with fierce watches and a spectacular set of necklaces lush with giant rubellites, Colombian emeralds and lashings of pavé diamonds. Labirinti, the brand’s high jewellery collection, is inspired by Italian garden mazes. It is a masterclass in showstopping design and a new bejewelled dragonfly has joined the bee in the Gucci garden.
It is Chanel day. However, following the abrupt departure of Viard, there is no ‘lead’ designer in place yet. If not Coppola, maybe the Olsens – everyone wants a woman. The collection, then, was designed by the studio of 150 craftspeople, who created the 46 looks at the six ateliers within 31 Rue Cambon. The show takes place at the epic and fabulously theatrical Opéra Garnier. We have been here for Stella McCartney in the past and John Galliano’s Dior too. However, we are not in the auditorium under the 1964 Marc Chagall ceiling; instead, the models appear from the doors of the boxes as if they are the ‘audience’, and so we watch them leaving.
The collection has a new lightness and a touch of a youthful Coco. Micro-short bodices that are worn with swaggering capes, evening dresses and ballgowns are a romance of elegant embroideries, illusion tulle and taffeta, and lashings of black, gold and white are cut with pale pink and celadon. The Chanel-owned Lesage has produced the finest of jewelled embroideries – cabochons, cameos and pearls. There are tricks or ‘elements’ from chandeliers with pendants of blown glass. The lightness is in the subtle layers of transparency and the black Karl bows in the hair are terrific. The tracklist includes Lovely Head by Goldfrapp and Life Is by Jessica Pratt, “It’s the age of what’s to come and, baby, you’re on…”. Oh yes, Chanel is definitely on.
After the Opéra, it’s a different kind of showtime at the newly refurbished Lido 2 on the Champs-Élysées, the club that couturier Alexis Mabille has redesigned. The ringside booths are stacked with buckets of champagne (the drink being the name of the collection). When in France.
As the finale ‘wedding’ look of a catsuit in glittering micro paillettes exits, the stage floor rises, fountains of water pulsate and Dita Von Teese emerges inside her trademark martini glass, bathing in frothy champagne and dousing herself using a strawberry sponge. Bra off, she descends as the couture crowd uncharacteristically whoops.
At the Tiffany & Co. high jewellery presentation across town, the salon is fizzing with the latest chapter of its spectacular Blue Book collection, Céleste. It is the real-deal reflection of Jean Schlumberger’s love of the cosmos, all shooting stars and solar flares of diamonds that are quite simply dazzling.
On the eve of Mr Armani’s 90th birthday, at Armani Privé we are treated to a lesson in the designer’s DNA. Languid, transparent, effortless and softly grown-up. A wave of liquid velvet and pearls for miles. Night-sky silvers. Heavy satin draped pants. Delicate. The morning dawn. This is history in the making, another time another world. I’m lucky to be here.
Wednesday
The high jewellery crusade continues at the Ritz with Cartier, we are on a roll. The Nature Sauvage collection is here, resplendent in its engineering. Other discoveries include the Coussin de Cartier ring and a bracelet from the Tutti Tutti collection that are crazy light. So incredibly supple, they are like pillows of softness to touch, completely flexible sapphires. There is a staggering opulence and intricacy in this voluptuousness.
At the Salons de Couture on Avenue George V, Balenciaga is a mess of Nicole Kidman with her daughter Sunday; Naomi Watts and her daughter Kai are there too; Juergen Teller and his partner, Dovile Drizyte. It’s a family affair. There is something wickedly spectacular about the old and the new here – such is the audacious modernity of Demna’s thinking.
As the first looks pass through the salon, with their blend of subcultural and Balenciaga codes, the volume of the street meets the classic cocoon: the collection is electrifying. A faux-fur coat of synthetic hair is shaped, and hand- dyed too. Couture looks have been upcycled and reconstructed. Jackets that appear to be tied at the waist are engineered as one look. The hair and make-up add goth. Balenciaga has always challenged preconceptions of traditional couture and it’s exciting.
Thursday
The mercury has hit 40 degrees. It’s damn hot as we head to the Ritz again (hard life) for the launch of the Celine Beauty collection by Hedi Slimane. It kicks off with one red lipstick, Le Rouge Triomphe, the brand’s first satin shade. He is super good at nailing the French woman and this is it in one glossy slick of red dressed in a weighty gold case.
The detail and care for exceptional design that creates an emotional intercourse is running rich through couture. The takeaway: Paris wins the fashion Olympics.
Issue 73 of 10 Magazine – RISING, RENEW, RENAISSANCE – is on newsstands September 19. Pre-order your copy here.
CITY OF LIGHT
Photographer KASIA WOZNIAK
Fashion Editor SOPHIA NEOPHITOU
Model ROXANE PLAZA at Apparence Agency
Hair DIEGO DA SILVA at Streeters using Ouai
Make-up PEP GAY at Management Artists using NARS
Manicurist ELSA OLSON at Calliste Agency
Photographer’s assistant TIMOTHY HACCIUS
Fashion assistants GEORGIA EDWARDS and NATALIIA SHKURKINA
Casting SIX WOLVES
Production SONYA MAZURYK
On the cover Roxane Plaza wears Schiaparelli Couture AW24
