PARIS FASHION WEEK:HUGE CROWDS of onlookers and sightseers gathered in the Tuileries Gardens yesterday to watch celebrity guests including Dita Von Teese and Rhianna surrounded by jostling camera teams arrive for the Dior show.
From a set straight out of Chaplin's Modern Timeswith steel girders and hanging chains, designer John Galliano sent out his models, all long blonde hair, red lipstick and high heels in a tribute to sirens of the silver screen, in particular Lauren Bacall, who was a Dior customer.
The femme fatale has always been a seductive fashion theme and this was a predictably polished, luxurious and glamorous show featuring trench coats in snakeskin, bronze lamé or black python casually tied over lurex skirts, metallic jeans or silk lingerie knickers.
The only accessories were towering wedge heels, sparkly ankle socks, heavy leather briefcases and a lot of attitude. It was defiantly commercial with much hard modern glitter and a swaggering finale of filmy red carpet dresses in rainbow colours. Modern times are hard times and this collection, though assured, played safe.
A gentler, more inclusive mood pervaded at Issey Miyake whose collection was a masterful interweaving of patterns and shapes in kaleidoscopic colours drawn from the east, west, north and south. The compass point moved from Celtic-inspired patterns woven in traditional Japanese brocades, loose macramé knits in Native American colours to digital African prints decorating leggings or summery tunics. A finale in which the models entered from each corner of the catwalk into moving concentric circles drove home the point.
If Miyake was multicultural, Vivienne Westwood, currently on a crusade against climate change, blended styles of one century into another with her usual irreverence at her show in Hotel Pozzo di Borgo, Karl Lagerfeld’s former home. In the designer’s signature tatterdemalion attire, the models with painted white faces and high spiked hair, bore slogans about climate change. “Ribbons of torn cloth, worn bikini style” is what she exhorted eco warriors to wear, but the melange threw up appealing numbers such as milkmaid dresses in gold sequinned tulle, Jackson Pollock-style print wraps and Prince of Wales check suits, all tweaked in her inimitable way.
