Paris Chic in Retreat
Runways Are Intriguing, But Not Classically French

By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 3, 2008

PARIS, Oct. 2

Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo sent a model down her runway dressed in a garment that looked as though it had been pieced together from deflated black soccer balls. The model's hair was hidden under a gray cotton-candy-like wig that rose nearly two feet high and made one wonder what Marie Antoinette had in common with David Beckham.

Just the day before, Maison Martin Margiela celebrated its 20th anniversary with a retrospective that included one-legged pants, backless jackets and other clothes -- to use the term loosely -- that might as well have been plucked from a surrealist painting. Indeed, to show off a particularly bold golden necklace, a model was wheeled out atop a platform, with her head and neck jutting from an oversize jewelry box.

Paris fashion, at its best, is an exploration of shape-shifting and fabric innovation, examining one's basic assumptions about aesthetics and practicality. Yet as that philosophy has blossomed, the traditional touchstones of French style have all but disappeared. Chanel and Hermès are virtually the only exceptions.

Fashion here, as in New York and Milan, is a global business. But while other cities maintain a sensibility unique to their geography -- New York still emphasizes sportswear, Milan focuses on tailoring, leather goods and sex appeal -- there is little on the runways here that cries out "French" with any conviction.

Only a handful of prominent French designers are at the helms of their own houses here. Fewer still lead the venerable old names such as Lanvin or Christian Dior. But more important than the nationality of the designer is that certain once-inescapable terms -- "bon chic bon genre," "Rive Gauche," even "coquettish" -- no longer apply to the sensibility dominating the runways here.

Their absence from French fashion comes up as the presentations of spring 2009 collections reached the halfway mark and the designer Sonia Rykiel celebrated her 40th anniversary. Rykiel is known for her quintessentially French point of view with her line's saucy St.-Germain-des-Prés style of trim knits, jaunty dresses and droll embellishments. The festivities marking her longevity underscored the reality that no major house speaks that language anymore.

Christian Lacroix, another Frenchman with his own label, creates boisterously exuberant but often fussy ready-to-wear that all too often lacks the urgency required of life now.

Givenchy

Urbane sophistication and femininity are no longer synonymous with Givenchy, which has been under the creative direction of designer Riccardo Tisci for three years. The collection he put on the runway Wednesday was inspired by cowboys and the iconography of the American West. That is the kind of reference material that should immediately raise eyebrows because it can so easily lead to the creation of costumes rather than clothes. And frankly, even the best Western gear tends toward Halloween unless one happens to be sitting on a horse or herding cattle.

Tisci avoided the pitfalls of creating garments better suited to a gunslinger film, but the result still was not pretty. What came down the runway for spring was alarming, not because it was poorly constructed but because it was ugly: tight black pants with insets of gold leather, a white jersey dress with tooth-shaped crystals hanging off it, bosoms strapped into yellow dresses and shrouded in sheer taupe chiffon. How could a designer -- and those arbiters of good taste with whom he surrounds himself -- not see how unflattering much of the collection was?

This collection was particularly disheartening because his work for fall -- dominated by some of the most beautiful and luxurious blouses and dresses of the season -- was so self-assured and thoughtfully restrained.

Jean Paul Gaultier

Jean Paul Gaultier was once Paris's great provocateur. Tuesday night, he showed a collection inspired by the body-conscious-clothing movement and ease of dance. Gaultier, who loves oddballs and characters, opened and closed his presentation with performances by a trio of dancers who were not classically beautiful. A female dancer was squat and muscular. A male dancer was exceptionally thin with an arm span that seemed to stretch the width of the runway. And the third dancer was androgynous with a luxuriant mane of brown kinky hair.

Gaultier focused on jersey, creating trousers that clung to the derriere and suits that moved in such synchronicity with the body that they were like a second skin. But the collection was inconsistent, with some pieces striking a strong enticing chord and others that were barely memorable. Too often that has been the problem with Gaultier's collections. They are strong on themes, but the clothes themselves lack wallop.

Gaultier was once able to startle and rile with his work, which has been inspired by tribalism, the dress of Hasidic Jews and the styles that sprang from the African diaspora. But the fashion industry -- and the broader culture -- has caught up with Gaultier. Where he once was in the brazen forefront celebrating full-body tattoos as a daring flourish, he is now in the middle of a society that jokes about a population of tattooed adults who will soon receive membership cards from AARP.

Dries Van Noten, Hussein Chalayan, Yohji Yamamoto

French fashion over the past few days has been in the hands of introverted intellectuals and progressive thinkers. Designer Dries Van Noten approached spring 2009 with a clean slate -- one stripped of the florals and chaotic prints that had distinguished his work over the past few seasons. In their place were windowpane checks, soothing ombre prints and stark contrasts between navy and white.

His collection unfolded Wednesday like a relaxing exhalation. His trousers were loose-fitting and cropped, the jackets slightly oversize and the dresses draped softly on the body and tied to one side. There was just enough structure to keep his easy silhouettes from turning sloppy. And just enough sparkle, such as gold sequin embroidery on the breast of a jacket, to make the simple shapes dazzle.

Later that evening, Hussein Chalayan showed his first collection since becoming flush with money from Puma. It was called Inertia, and it toyed with the effects of wind and movement on fabric. His soundtrack was the high and low tones created by fingers grazing the rims of glasses.

His models wore garments in colorful abstract prints that were constructed to look as though they had been caught in a breeze. A jacket was pinched along the torso, capturing the ripple effect of wind on fabric, for instance. And in the finale, a group of models emerged in dresses molded to imply the lashing force of a gale wind. Two wind machines blowing the models' hair added to the illusion. And then, suddenly, crash! The glasses shattered. The soundtrack stopped. The wind ceased. Inertia collapsed. Cool.

For so many of the designers who have recently presented their collections, the clothes are not enough to satisfy their creativity. These designers need a riddle. Or, perhaps, a gimmick.

The average person accustomed to thinking of trousers as something with two distinctly separate openings for the legs would have been bemused by what came down Yohji Yamamoto's runway. His cropped black trousers peeked from below oversize white shirts, black jackets were appliqued with the graceful white hands of a woman, the familiar lines of a man's tuxedo were translated into a woman's skirt, moving it beyond androgyny and toward a more powerful, encompassing kind of femininity.

Yamamoto doesn't like to tell audiences the story behind his collection. Make up your own, he says. It will be correct.

Maison Martin Margiela, Comme des Garçons

At Maison Martin Margiela, the person for whom the house is named hasn't been seen in public for years. He doesn't do interviews. Questions e-mailed or faxed to him are answered in the first-person plural. Who knows who's actually designing the label? And it makes the company's elegantly offbeat tailoring all the more intriguing.

Kawakubo, hiding backstage in the inky blackness of her show for Comme des Garçons, deals in riddles. Her favorite one is: What are clothes? Are they a source of modesty? Should they offer some identifying characteristics about gender, income and rank -- and thus help to maintain the social order? Or should they camouflage those things? Do they have to be attractive, and if so, who exactly is the judge of that? Or is this all really a load of pretentious hooey and can someone just pass me a T-shirt and a pair of jeans?

Kawakubo's deconstructed soccer balls looked like giant black eggs cracked open. They were neither beautiful nor ugly; they were simply compelling, and that's quite a trick. It's difficult to create clothes that postpone a visceral response. We are prone to thinking in stark contrasts, ignoring subtleties and making snap judgments. Kawakubo forces contemplation. She removes the influence of color. The collection was all black -- except for a few gusts of ivory and gray. She fools with texture and logic, creating backward blazers that button down the spine and explode with feathery bouquets of fabric across the chest.

Her dresses are virtual topiaries of plush feathered fabric. Her shoes are flat lace-ups, their gray iridescent sheen reflecting the lonely spotlight, their long pointy toes forcing the models into a flat-footed stomp.

Paris fashion can make your head hurt with esoteric meanderings. But it is impossible to ignore. And besides, it would be sad to try.