Paris: Dries van Noten and Christian Lacroix have channeled “Barry Lyndon”, Andreas Kronthaler and Vivienne Westwood Mozart, and on Sunday the American designer Thom Browne went trivial for Madame de Pompidour.
With designers who fall out of love with streetwear, Paris Fashion Week has gone crazy for the 18th century.
Even the most important man of Streetwear, the American Virgil Abloh, rolled back his clock this week and put Gigi Hadid in a backlog of pink puffball dress and another model in a zipper jacket worn like a cape.
He wasn’t alone. Crinolines and spring light hoops almost emerged in Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe show as if they were leisure clothing.
“If I had a perfumed handkerchief, I would blow it now,” a worshiping critic at the end of the Thom Browne show, as a posse of Pompidours in grinded skyscraper Versailles -wigs around a white man’s pis fountain.
While Seersucker -birds fluttered above the head and dust flowers from the arch formal garden that created the New Yorker, Millinery Guru Stephen Jones said that fashion screamed for a little splendor and pump and circumstances.
‘People want fantasy now’
“There has been the whole idea of usability” with sportswear that dominated the catwalks for several seasons, said the British Hatter, who created the towering headwear of the show.
“But I think people want fantasy now.”
The Queen of Punk Vivienne Westwood of Great Britain has always had a weakness for the 18th-century decadence.
And her designer husband Andreas Kronthaler, born in Austria, found a surprisingly elegant and modern “Rock Me Amadeus” letter in their show inspired by Mozart on Saturday.
Given that the night shirts of the period, riding pants and Knickerbockers can easily be adapted for men or women, Kronthaler told AFP that the gender fluidity of the era was very “now”.
Boys “can be just as beautiful as women in a dress,” he kept full, even a hoop, “it can be adjusted.”
“Of course not every dress will suit a man,” he added backstage, while he waved champagne with actress Pamela Anderson and various stars of “Rupaul’s Drag Race”.
Kronthaler went big on the 18th-century suede ankle shoes and pair on Gigi’s sister Bella Hadid-Evenings bent sandals, just like Browne with mules in the same Seersucker pastel nursery tones of his collection.
‘Really beyond’
With “Game of Thrones” actress Maisie Williams (who played Arya Stark) in the first row of Browne, Jones said another reason why designers kept coming back to the era of Enlightenment because “the 18th century was real”.
“What we wear today is really calm and modest compared to what people wore 200 and 300 years ago,” he said AFP.
Van Noten, who took the classic film by Stanley Kubrick from 1975 about an 18th-century Irish Rake as an inspiration for his show with veteran maker Christian Lacroix, agreed.
The Belgian, known as the “King of Prints”, said he had to weaken the original sour colors of historical patterns that caught his attention.
“They were anything but shy,” he added.
All that corsetry and bodies that beg to be torn, have a kinky sexiness that also agrees with designers.
Fashion’s enfant terrible of the moment, Demna Gvasalia, known for his post-Soviet Munster models and his cynical view of branding and consumerism, may have made his name with $ 800 hoodies.
But the biggest shock that the Georgian was cooked in his show on Sunday was following a fetish dress with a line of crews crinolinebalhowns that made Miss Scarlett from the board game Cluedo think.
With an important exhibition about the greatest fashion icon of the 18th century, Marie Antoinette – the queen who lost her head in the French Revolution – who was opened in Paris next month, the trend will probably continue.
It contains some of the famous decadent designs by John Galliano for Dior during his pump, as well as the hugely popular Japanese Manga, “The Rose of Versailles”.
The Japanese master Yohji Yamamoto sent a large black hat that Marie Antoinette might have worn on the guillotine as a last bloom if she was allowed in his show in Paris, although his crinolines were more Belle Epoque than Pompidour.
“Fashion is sometimes very mysterious?” Said Jones. “All these people who at the same time think the same things, but I think it’s not for nothing.”
