Fashion month draws to a close tomorrow on a season which most on the front benches have found underwhelming. It derives from a combination of conservative punts from designers looking at the bottom line and a creative muteness attributed to the world’s precarious state. Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino and Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons sent out entirely black collections (Kawakubo’s one concession — a white look as her peace-offering finale).
The Japanese octogenarian spoke for many women when she said: “This collection is about my present state of mind. I have anger against everything in the world, especially against myself.” Anger was certainly a theme.
After Seán McGirr unveiled his furiously anticipated first collection as creative director of Alexander McQueen (Sarah Burton stepped down in October after 13 years at the helm), the online comments were unremittingly angry, aghast at what the keyboard warriors saw as desecration of the house. One does wonder, how many of these laptop-loons are McQueen customers? To be fair to McGirr, anyone stepping into that role would be tested. He’s not had long to pull it together. It would’ve been smarter for the house to take a season off and give him the time and breadth to develop his ideas. But that bottom line doesn’t like off-seasons.
Dublin-born 35-year-old McGirr mined McQueen’s 1995 The Birds collection, and backstage spoke of “this idea of anti-politeness. We live in a very polite world at the moment… [McQueen] was doing the opposite of what was happening in mainstream fashion; it was about these people on the fringes, the outsiders”. There were some interesting bits, but polarising ones too: the horse hoof boots for one. If his remit is to throw an off-centre millennial eye towards an emerging Gen Z client then that’s understandable. It was certainly different: whether that turns out to be a positive remains to be seen. It’s one thing to be provocative, it’s another just not to be very good.
At Balenciaga, Demna was back in full esoteric control after a year of contrition from the fall-out from his bondage-teddy campaign fiasco. His everything-is-content approach spliced together dresses from lace slips and bras (both quite gorgeous) and went back to his classic irony punts with eBay and Planet Earth (in Planet Hollywood script) merch plays. The screens, which encased the catwalk, at one point were covered in people filming themselves on social media. It felt like a dystopian future; it is of course our bizarre present.
What these two men stirred is a question over the validity of retaining these brands once their founders have died. Why are we putting new talent into designer straitjackets, forced to explain their work through the long-dead medium of another? It posits the question: how will we ever find a new McQueen if we keep expecting rising stars to cosplay?
Yet two of the most compelling collections came from Louise Trotter’s second outing at Carven and Chemena Kamali’s debut at Chloé. Both women in their forties, they offered deft, confident and covetable ideas of what grown-up women might like to wear. There were no tortured pretensions, just beautiful well-made clothes with plenty of creative twists. Funny that.
