Listen to fashion critic-at-large Cathy Horyn read her review.
The other day, on my way into Celine to see Michael Rider, I noticed a group of small tents set up in the courtyard. I later learned that Gus Van Sant, the director and photographer, was there to make portraits of the models before Saturday’s show and that he was using old Polaroid stock. Which means the images would eventually fade. When I found Rider in his studio, he told me he has trouble remembering things that have just happened in fashion. So do I! That’s how Rider and his team began the fall collection, thinking of things that don’t get lost in the noise.
They decided that the answer was a look of confidence in the designs, achieved by a leaner, more stripped-back silhouette but also by trusting Celine’s customers to do whatever they liked. The lineup included sharp tailoring as well as loose-fitting tunics in black or white satin with wide-leg pants. One tunic was initially designed as a dress, Rider said, but a person on the team remarked that it would look better as a dress, so they cut it off and put a knot at the hem. The style, to me, had an American ease. The satin would feel great on your body, and I haven’t seen the look elsewhere.
A lot of collections lately have “a heft that passes with a concept glued to it,” as someone else put it. They’re “big-ass coat shows.” Everything is overbuilt, with extreme shoulders and excessive volume, apparently to make the garment more exciting on a screen image. But Rider doesn’t do that. He had great-looking raincoats in a fresh shade of manilla that you could throw over anything and didn’t feel clunky or trendy. Other coats were done in wool gabardine, a fabric that probably doesn’t seem very luxurious to people today but it has a body and it’s fluid, so it moves with you.
Rider also included a shearling jacket, worn with red flares and white boots, and a coat printed with wild animal spots. He wanted the prints to look like the animal — not a blur, like so many other designs — and to have the feeling of Desperately Seeking Susan, leaving with Mom’s coat.
I love Rider’s new direction at Celine; it’s a visual punch. And the show is still on my mind — it hasn’t begun to dissolve like Van Sant’s images.
While Rider and I were talking in the studio, he mentioned a long black wool crêpe dress with self-fringe at the cuffs, hem, and around the V-neckline. It appears late in the show, over a navy turtleneck. He said, “It’s a crêpe that we started to develop in my favorite show we ever did at Celine, with Phoebe. That collection really turned the page at Celine.” (Rider worked with Phoebe Philo before he moved to Ralph Lauren. He later came back to Celine as creative director.) It happens to be my favorite show, too, held in a private home in the fall of 2012. I’ve written about it a lot, because it best captured the enigmatic quality of Philo’s work. Many people will remember the collection for its fur-covered pumps and Birkenstocks. For me, though, the killer dress was in black wool with fringe. Yet, when I saw it later in the showroom, I was dismayed by its weight.
Rider had not forgotten it. He and the studio worked hard on the fabric, and they turned my fleeting holy grail of a dress into a lovely, fluid djellaba with an eccentric air from the shape and fringe.
Last fall, in his debut for Jean Paul Gaultier, Duran Lantink made one long, boring sex joke with a corseted top sprouting big boobs and flesh-tone bodysuits printed with hairy, naked male bodies. But his new collection, on Sunday, converted me. Lantink, 39, may be a genius, I think. He dug deep into Gaultier’s extraordinary story of tailoring, its precision and almost ironic sense of Parisian chic — not to mention its subversive edge — and came up with a great new expression. It’s a model for how you reinvent a brand.
Lantink took some of the most familiar Gaultier elements, the so-called codes, like pinstripes and houndstooth checks, black leather, corsetry, and other sexual trappings — and reimagined them in unexpected ways. Waistcoats and a black pleated silk bomber looked almost provocative in combination with strict, precise tailoring. Lantink’s term for the effect was “madame masculinity,” and he said it was “playing with overdressing, underdressing, quite boxy forms, very silhouette-y things.”
That came across in a razor-sharp houndstooth coat with a jutting pleat in the lower portion of the front and a group of performative-looking cowboy pieces, all in black, with cowboy hats and a black dress emitting puffs of smoke. “Well, I’m not going to tell how that works,” Lantink said with a grin. But he added that he wanted to make “smoking dresses,” almost as if you were in “a western movie and you come into a saloon.”
Taut and sexy, these were another kind of western fantasy, with Lantink distorting the body in interesting ways. A long black pleated cape began just below the model’s chin, making her seem neckless.
Also fascinating were his knitted bodysuits in a blend of houndstooth and Tyrolean patterns with embedded lingerie, white helmets that were a blend of winter sports and surgical patient, and printed bodysuits that evoked wooden mechanical dolls. But the impressive thing, to me, was how Lantink interpreted the sexuality in Gaultier’s fashion and pushed it into strange, new territory. It helped, too, that the workmanship was nearly flawless.
What’s happened to Pierpaolo Piccioli? The former creative director of Valentino, now at Balenciaga, can’t seem to get a handle on his new gig. Last season, he drew upon the influence of his predecessors, Demna and Nicolas Ghesquière, and of course Cristóbal Balenciaga — for that opening black sack dress.
But this time, in a carpeted dungeon of a room that was a gutted shopping mall in central Paris, he showed a collection with no clear, compelling point of view. Apart from some barrel-shaped coats and leather jackets with stand-away collars, worn with black leggings and stilettos, I didn’t see a distinctive Balenciaga look. I saw many looks, in fact, none of them especially new. Piccioli tries to be cool, and maybe that’s what is tripping him up. He’s not a cool designer. He makes elegant clothes, and there’s nothing wrong with that if you believe in it.