Just over a month ago, Versace announced that Pieter Mulier would become its new creative director, a move considered a fait accompli in an industry that loves to talk. Mulier is the first designer to inherit the house of Azzedine Alaïa, who died in 2017, and on Wednesday night in Paris, he gave his final show for the brand. And it was quite a gathering.
Many of his oldest and closest friends were there, pushed together on benches in the former premises of the Cartier Foundation, a glass-and-steel box designed by Jean Nouvel. There were Raf Simons; Matthieu Blazy, who is Mulier’s former partner and also the designer of Chanel; the casting and art director Samuel Ellis Scheinman; the photographer Willy Vanderperre; and the stylist Olivier Rizzo. Like Mulier, they all live in or have a connection to Antwerp.
For the first time since Mulier’s debut, in July 2021, on the street in front of Alaïa’s sprawling building in the Marais, the company allowed the room to fill up to the rafters, like fashion shows of the past. Without decorum. People stood between the benches, in the corners and on stairs overlooking the snaking runway. The models walked close to the guests. And when the brisk show was over, the crowd exploded in applause and cheers, with some people, including Simons, standing on benches.
Mulier was visibly moved and maybe exhausted. He said his aim with this exit was to do “real clothes.” Recalling what he told his team, “What is a jacket? What is a dress? What is an Alaïa dress? So it’s basically a vocabulary of the five years of what I learned at Alaïa that I’m going to leave for the next [designer].” He said he didn’t want to do a huge or overly creative collection. His work has often leaned to the conceptual. “One, it’s not the moment, and you don’t do that when you leave the house. You keep it calm, you go back to the roots,” he added.
The opening second-skin dresses, with square necklines in the palest shades of blue, gray, and bisque, made that point. The models’ hair was soft and loose. Those sublime dresses were followed by tailored coats in black leather and superfine calf hair, slim jersey dresses with wide ribbing at the top of the hips or a long triangular panel of croc-effect leather (a detail that, for me, recalled a style of Alaïa’s in the early 2000s), and belted coats in plush wool (or cashmere) with swingy skirts over tapered pants. The clothes were comprehensible, grounded in reality—in fact, the kind that would catch your eye on the street.
Mulier’s Alaïa hasn’t always been in that realm. He said, “I doubted for a long time to go as strict, as reduced to the essence. Because I thought, Ah, maybe it’s not enough for the fashion world. But I think it should be enough for the fashion world.” After a pause, he added, “Because it makes my heart beat.” Luxury, he added, is not what many people think it is. Rather, it’s the nearly perfect fit of a garment. And, by the way, those second-skin dresses just skimmed the body, making them even more appealing.
Mulier says he’ll take a long break before he starts at Versace, to spend time with friends and family and travel to Africa. Philippe Fortunato, the CEO of the fashion and accessories brands of Richemont, the owner of Alaïa, said the company will take its time, too, to find a successor.
Alaïa’s relatable fall clothes and Mulier’s comment about the fashion world point out a familiar snag — which is that too many collections are overly styled, pushed and pulled, and full of artifice. I liked much of Haider Ackermann’s Tom Ford show on Wednesday. Held on white carpeting against white walls, it became a virtual lab once the glaring lights came on and the first alien-blonde models began drifting about the room, stopping to pose in, say, a crisp white shirt-jacket with pinked edges over a black lace mini-slip and black hosiery. Or a cropped white T-shirt with black masculine trousers held up by a thin belt detached from the waistband. One older model, with gray-streaked hair, had on a black croc pencil skirt with matching stiletto boots and a cream crewneck, her flat, thin handbag more for show than actual content.
Ackermann brings more variety to the brand with this collection, without diluting his genderless, almost hard and greedy vision of glamour, which is like an update of American Psycho. There were well-done coats and jackets in clear vinyl edged in black (perhaps leather) that are at once witty and kinky; black-and-white-speckled fur coats and knits; and that razor-sharp tailoring he brought to Ford. Also in the varied mix were somewhat relaxed feminine pantsuits, including one in tweed with a pale-blue sheer blouse. A white dinner jacket for men (or, why not, women) that seemed based on a waistcoat, and was shown with an undone white silk shirt and stock tie, looked fresh, different. But often I found myself wondering where the flesh-and-blood person was in these too-perfect clothes. They can seem more costume than fashion.
Even before Antonin Tron’s first collection for Balmain, I imagined what he might show: draped silk cocktail dresses, fitted black leather jackets, everyday dark trousers, perhaps a lanky wool jacket with gold buttons. That’s because Tron would inevitably want to move Balmain away from the Olivier Rousteing era in his debut and not quite toward the street cool of another predecessor, Christophe Decarnin. It was a decent start, but the challenge is how to make these fairly conservative (if sexy) clothes feel distinctive and not like so many other French brands.
The fashion crowd goes bonkers for horses. Who can blame us? Stella McCartney once again invited a well-known French trainer and his Camargue ponies — in black and white — to her show as the backdrop in an arena in the Bois de Boulogne. She did the same three years ago. The collection went on a dressy trot, with good-looking tops or two-piece dresses edged in a thick band of ecofur, a beige crewneck with classic gray trousers, some sporty rugby shirts tucked primly into jeans spliced with a zipper, and her reliably cool party attire like silk camisoles and tailored trousers.
Julien Klausner’s collection for Dries Van Noten was warmed through, thanks to the curious marriage of teen spirit and Flemish art from the 17th century, a period when Antwerp seemed at the center of the western world. He recalled a visit last fall to a Paris high school to scout a show venue, his team arriving as the bell rang. “Hundreds of students came pouring out,” he said. “We all got a bit giggly. We were six or seven from the team, and it got me thinking about what a universal feeling it is to think back to those school days.”
That meant uniforms translated as dark kilts, blazers, white shirts and ties, and varsity jackets, mostly with chunky boots. But, as usual, the Dries energy was in the mix of patterns and moods. Klausner brought in images of Flemish still lifes of fruit, flowers, butterflies — objects that suggest “the fleeting passage of beauty,” he said. He did jacquards and prints in pixilated versions, and also embroideries of the same visual fragments. The collection struck me as dark, sometimes heavy, with its patchwork, floral fabrics that evoked tapestries, and murky plaids; call them grunge.
Or were the collages of materials and sentiments a reflection of his adopted city? “Living in Antwerp, you find this kind of treasure box of a city,” the designer said. Klauser also used a coming-of-age theme for his recent men’s collection, but here the sense of discovery involved a very worldly city and its amazing influence on fashion. Women will unpack what they like.