Robin Givhan, The Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning fashion critic, is covering Paris Fashion Week. Read her Fashion Week stories as she makes her way from runway to runway, and follow her on Twitter: @robingivhan.
PARIS — Just like that, everything changed. Designer Phoebe Philo sent a beautiful, eloquent and vibrant spring 2016 collection down the Céline runway and suddenly a new pathway had opened. Philo offered a clearly defined, different way of dressing that wasn’t just of this moment. Philo had cast her gaze towards the future.
Philo offered a dynamic way forward from this city’s long history of dressing women like precious objects hermetically sealed in embroidered silk or understated banality. Most notably, it was a counterargument to the cri de coeur of Hedi Slimane, whose Saint Laurent collections have consumed much of the oxygen in this city. This season, as they have since his arrival at the brand in 2012, his clothes conjured up images of affectless young women with the body of a 12-year-old boy and the attitude of an art school snob.
Philo’s collection exudes self-possession. Slimane’s speaks of disaffection. Céline resembles nothing else that has come before. Saint Laurent is a pastiche of popular culture that has sprouted from the world of music.
There was nothing terribly complicated about the Céline clothes; they did not require an instruction booklet. But neither were they based on yoga pants and the myth of the perfect white T-shirt. Philo’s clothes did not presume that every woman’s secret desire is to be a rock star or the central character on a reality show.
Philo’s collection for Céline was a stunning ode to female confidence without any of the usual cliches of high heels, big shoulders or pencil-slim skirts. Her models — their hair smoothed back into a simple braid, their lips painted red — walked along a dirt floor and through a set realized by the Danish artist FOS. Colorful fabric walls created a vibrant maze.
The models moved with determination. Their expressions were not glowering and they were not strutting. They were not vacantly smiling to appease social perceptions about how women are supposed to look. They were simply focused.
The show began with a slip dress: cream satin with midnight trim. With each successive look, the models were more fully clothed. The bodice was now a delicate knit, a navy jacket was slipped over the shoulders. Then she was wearing tan trousers that were simply and beautifully cut. The woolen coats had an hourglass shape thanks to insets of knit at the waist. The coats were not precious princess cuts. The had more volume, more sophistication.
The clothes were worn with flats or block heels. Easy dresses with a soft shape were paired with work boots or sharp-toed flats.
What made this collection so beautiful was its unwillingness to trade feminine softness in the pursuit of structure. It was not androgynous; a look that can often be something melancholy, as if the wearer is sealing off whole sections of personality, desire and individual humanity.
This collection wasn’t minimalist, either. The clothes had movement and detail and were more joyful than austere. The women wore big chunky hoop earrings and carried handbags that looked like they could hold an iPad or two. These were day clothes that also functioned as professional clothes. They were professional clothes that looked stylish and cool, fun and impeccable.
They suggested that a woman might find pleasure in her work life — that she might enjoy the prospect of preparing for her day and considering what she might accomplish and how afterwards, she will feel satisfied and proud. Perhaps that’s what’s so dynamic about these clothes: they are for a woman who is unapologetically enthralled and enriched by her individual triumphs. No apologies, no second-guessing, no juggling of priorities.
Most women cannot afford Céline, and even those who can may simply not believe in spending $3,000 for a frock that doesn’t come with its own valet. But Philo has set a template. It is not a working mother, a socialite, a celebrity, a hipster, a homemaker, a sexpot, a school marm or a power broker. The spring Céline collection is not about any of those archetypes on which designers rely. It simply and beautifully celebrates confidence.
There is a dark, brooding insecurity to the Saint Laurent aesthetic. His models are not slump-shouldered from the burdens of monthly bills, the sorrow of a disintegrating marriage or any of the existential fears that can flow from a life entering its twilight. They have the angry intensity of youthful powerlessness, creativity constrained and the swirl of hormones that make narcissism irresistible.
Slimane’s Monday night show was dominated by a parade of thigh-skimming slip dresses in sheer sparkling mesh, metallic gold, slinky satin and other fabrics and materials that called to mind an evening of nightclub debauchery. They were topped with a borrowed-from-the-boys tuxedo jacket, roomy black leather motorcycle jackets, a leopard print coat and shaggy jackets. Each little grumpy model was crowned with a grunge tiara.
For day — or at least as an alternative to a slip dress — Slimane dressed his models in faded jeans, a white T-shirt and a khaki trench coat — a look so aggressively familiar and quotidian that the model wearing it could quite simply have wandered in off the street. There was a denim mini-skirt with a frayed hem, a patchwork denim cape with strings hanging from the hem and other banal-looking garments. None of them had the gussied-up look that would telegraph “designer.” They will, however, have designer fashion prices. And so one hopes that those T-shirts feel like a dream and that trench coat has an interior hand-finished by the gods.
But Slimane’s Saint Laurent has never been Fashion — not if it is defined as something ever shifting, a riddle of creativity or a billboard for luxury. Slimane creates a collage of cultural touchstones that define youth. And if slipping on one of his motorcycle jackets or a pair of his faded jeans feels, for some, like slipping into the fountain of youth, what price is too high?
While Céline stood out for its powerful universality, designers such as Stella McCartney and Chitose Abe of Sacai each spoke to the reality of women’s lives in a more focused manner. Each profferred women in lieu of Slimane’s girls.
[Chitose Abe of Sacai: Fashion that deconstructs the familiar, intrigues the eye]
Abe is an experimenter, pulling apart garments and re-assembling them in ways that reveal the reality of their construction and the poetry of their beauty. Using fabrics patterned from bandanas, vintage Peruvian rugs and souvenir scarves, Abe crafted a collection that was witty, sexy and intellectually provocative.
To see one of her dresses designed to look as though it has been tugged off the shoulder or ripped down the side to expose a lacy slip is a suggestive gesture. And it makes one consider what it means to be undressed — literally and metaphorically.
Stella McCartney’s collection was rooted in sportiness: sleek skirts, ruminations on polo shirts, crisp dark denim with delicate white top-stitching. McCartney’s clothes speak to a woman’s playful side, her coolness.
Her collection did not have the searing strength of Céline, the adventureousness of Sacai or the indolence of Saint Laurent. But it had more joy than all of them combined. And that should not be undervalued.
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