Where's The Woman?
When Not Engineering a New Eiffel Tower, Paris Designers Can Tailor Pretty Frocks

By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 9, 2007

PARIS, Oct. 8 With only a handful of exceptions, designers here can be categorized in one of two ways. There are those such as John Galliano and Alber Elbaz who idealize women, nursing romantic notions about their lives and envisioning them as more sophisticated, more self-assured, more elegant and graceful than they could ever hope to be.

And then there are the designers who fetishize women. They obsess about a single physical trait. These designers are provocative, in part, because they tend not to see women as whole human beings but as symbols. Their minds are free from the mundane notion that their clothes must be wearable, comfortable or even dignified. Dignity can be sacrificed for the greater good of the aesthetic vision.

Alexander McQueen is the most fetishistic of designers -- obsessed by the female form, happy to use it as an expression of power or impotence, oblivious to the fear in the eyes of the young models who are his tools of expression.

But by the time the spring 2008 collections ended here Sunday, other designers, such as Stefano Pilati of Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs of Louis Vuitton, had also stubbornly used hyperbole to sexualize women, exploit them or simply make them trip over their own feet. Pilati, for instance, focused so much on the lines in his star-spangled strappy sandals that it did not seem to have occurred to him that if a professional model was struggling to walk in his stilettos that he had failed as a designer.

His shoes were a distraction from his tailoring, which was exacting, with strong shoulders in jackets and audaciously pegged trousers. His tent dresses possessed grace. But his overuse of stars -- an embrace of a YSL signature -- to adorn the cap sleeves of a black dress or the body of a white silk one, cheapened them and cut their level of sophistication by half.

Louis Vuitton

Jacobs collaborated with artist Richard Prince for the collection he showed Sunday. The clothes were in many ways repetitious of Jacobs's signature line, which debuted in New York last month. There were unfinished trench coats, girlish collage sweaters and skirts with false fronts that played tricks on the eye. But mostly there were handbags, in which the LV logo was washed in color and overlaid with verse. The bags were carried out by a series of runway stars such as models Naomi Campbell and Natalia Vodianova dressed as naughty nurses in translucent rubber uniforms, a reference to Prince's series of paintings of nurses inspired by the covers of pulp fiction novels.

Designers don't use just silk and linen as the raw materials of their work. They use women, relying on muses, icons and passersby for inspiration. The greatest challenge for a designer is to balance the needs of a flesh-and-blood woman with the one who lives in his imagination. (In Paris, the designers are overwhelmingly male.)

Their task is made more difficult by the women with whom they are most likely to associate. Designers are surrounded by editors, fans and sycophants whose love for fashion and creative endeavors is such that they are willing to endure discomfort in exchange for an empowering boost in height that comes from a pair of platform stilettos. Many of them will wear a minidress so short they can't bend over or squat down without putting on a lingerie exhibition. And if they drop their wallets, they'd just as soon leave them in the street as risk a fashion faux pas. They have access to car services, dress for cocktails and have a vested interest (read: advertising dollars) in never flatly telling a designer that his work is ugly, insulting or just lacking. Bad behavior is enabled and so is bad design. It's not the individual; it's the system.

Designers must find that one person who will always be honest -- perhaps a business partner with an eye on the bottom line. Or they must have an internal voice of humility that leavens their creative swagger.

Lanvin, John Galliano, Nina Ricci

Few designers can send a ripple of desire and pleasure through an audience the way Elbaz did at his show for Lanvin Sunday. Elbaz's clothes look easy, but precise. Sophisticated, but never stuffy. His control, focus, passion and good humor are evident in every garment.

Elbaz should be praised for the more elaborate cocktail dresses on his runway such as the brown tank dress with its tiers of silky fringe that mixed with rows of metallic trim or the taxicab yellow dress covered in cheerful paillettes that hung like rows of butterscotch candies.

But more remarkable still were the subtle pieces, such as the silky wrap dresses in navy with their matching trench coats, that floated into the air as the models walked. And there was the perfect white silk blouse with its billowing silhouette that tucked into a perfect black skirt with a slim fit. His shoes had high heels, but they were substantial ones and the models could stride down his runway with authority and strength.

Elbaz creates clothes that read like love notes. They express appreciation for femininity, but more important, they make a woman feel as though she is being complimented rather than ogled.

The collection Galliano presented Saturday was inspired by "Grey Gardens" and was filled with old-fashioned bathing beauties, sweet damsels and eccentric lovelies.

Galliano is an expert at evoking an almost painful yearning for love. The sculpted flowers that adorn his swing jackets have been crushed; his floral dresses in his signature bias cut trailed streamers of silk. One has the impression that the women of Galliano's fantasy are in the midst of epic heartbreak and he is searching for beauty in their tears.

If Galliano meditates on the vagaries of romance, then Nina Ricci designer Olivier Theyskens embraces the melancholy, the darkness and the aggression. His collection, with its palette of gray and washed-out blues, offered a welcome respite from the flowers and ruffles that have made spring 2008 a "pretty" season. His languid sweaters in shades such as ecru and ivory and his murky prints -- more swamp than garden -- are the rainy-day romantic alternative to the cloudless and sunny version expressed by other designers.

Givenchy, Chanel

Designers need muses or at least a fantasy woman they envision dressing. They need to be able to imagine their clothes in some context that does not involve a red carpet or a concert stage. Otherwise, the clothes seem disconnected from even the fringes of reality. Who is it that these designers envision dressing? Naomi Campbell sat in the audience at Galliano -- not exactly the average woman, but surely she makes the occasional trip to Starbucks. Trudie Styler and husband Sting were in the audience for Galliano's Christian Dior presentation -- a mix of mannish tailoring and lingerie-inspired dresses -- earlier in the week.

Courtney Love seems to be an unlikely and worrisome character to inspire any designer and yet she has been sitting front row at a host of shows, including Givenchy. Riccardo Tisci, the designer at Givenchy, has been working to transform the label once known for grace and restraint into something more aggressive and provocative. For spring, he threw every possible idea onto the runway: pleats, asymmetry, zipper details, high waists, baggy crotches, rivets, ball bearings, fanny packs. Most of it was black. None of it was good.

At Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld wove chains through washers on dresses and belted little quilted coin purses around the ankle. The bags -- which at a glance looked like the ankle monitors worn by starlets under house arrest -- were an especially absurd idea. But because they bear the Chanel name, undoubtedly an upcoming music video will feature three or four of them stacked on some singer's leg as she chants an ode to her ankle purse.

Herm¿s, Jean Paul Gaultier, Ralph Rucci

The collections from Jean Paul Gaultier -- his signature line as well as his work for Herm¿s -- were memorable. Not for the clothes and the woman who might wear them, but for their globetrotting and time-traveling themes. In his signature collection, he was inspired by swashbucklers and pirates and at Herm¿s he took his design cues from India. In his signature line there were camouflage skirts, intensely colored pantaloons and laced corset details. For Herm¿s, there were traditional saris as well as references to colonialism with crocodile jodhpurs.

The fashion industry rarely chooses the female head of state, the corporate executive or the stay-at-home mother as its icons. Are they afraid of the challenge? Ralph Rucci, who brought his ready-to-wear collection to Paris, knows how to make mature, rich ladies look even richer with his double-faced wool crepe suits, hand-painted coats and feather-dusted evening gowns. But who can find glamour in a PTA president? Whoever does that surely deserves an award.

Alexander McQueen, Miu Miu

Designers prefer turning to women such as the burlesque performer Dita von Teese, who attended shows such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton. McQueen was inspired by Isabella Blow. Before committing suicide earlier this year, Blow was a fashion editor, a talent scout, a fashion patron, a muse and an eccentric. She was known for her rigorous glamour that included form-fitting suits and elaborate hats designed by British milliner Phillip Treacy.

Blow discovered and championed McQueen's talent. It's clear why she was drawn to him. He has always favored constricting silhouettes in which comfort is sacrificed for line, and ease loses out to dazzle.

It was impossible not to see the passion in the collection he presented Friday, as well as his affection for Blow. But there is also something disturbing in the relationship between a designer who often seems willing to abuse women -- aesthetically speaking -- and a patron who seemed willing to be pummeled for the sake of style.

His form-fitting gray sheath with a red patent belt was sexy. His multicolored feather print gowns were beautiful. And his structured jackets with their sharp shoulders and dresses that looked as if they had molded around the body were mesmerizing. And the hats, designed by Treacy, immediately made one think of Blow, who never seemed to attend a fashion event without lobsters, flowers, horns or some sort of abstract horse hair sculpture sitting jauntily atop her head.

But McQueen's passion appeared to be mean-spirited when he put models in shoes that looked like miniature tables and made walking a test of balance and tenacity. He designed a dress with metal rods jutting up the back and out to the sides like a winged scoliosis brace. He can't seem to resist creating some sort of cage in which women can barely move and their discomfort is disconcertingly evident.

Women are complicit in this fetishism. Certainly Miuccia Prada, in her Miu Miu collection Sunday, revealed a fetish for women as babies or teenage Lolitas with her baby-doll dresses paired with bloomers and carved stiletto heels. Her brocade minidresses were beautiful and so were the harlequin printed ones. But what about women dressed as sexualized toddlers? The reaction from her audience was little more than a shrug.

It seems dishonest to pretend that such images don't matter -- as the fashion industry so often does. How can insiders admire the detail in McQueen's feather-adorned dresses and ignore the fact that he has paired his clothes with head coverings that look like medieval torture devices.

Perhaps Blow would have been fascinated by the spectacle of a woman with her head in a cage. Hopefully, a handful of people at McQueen's show found it curious. Because the most disconcerting response is to simply ignore it.