It has been a while since the city has been so busy and filled with joy and laughter and traffic. And this change is in part thanks to the fashion community, who are finally back in the city to celebrate being back with their colleagues again, to reconnect with designers and P.R. and to assist with the shows. This Haute Couture season is an ode to details, craft and savoir-faire that cannot be replaced by anything in the virtual world.
These are some of my favourite looks from the shows. I really enjoyed discovering them—it’s always an inspiration to see the collections with all their details and the inspirations behind them and I hope you will enjoy them too.
“At Chanel, Virginie Viard opted to take inspiration from iconic French painters. Bethe Morisot, an impressionist painter and the sister-in-law of Édouard Manet, and the Cubist Marie Larencin—a contemporary of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and of Mademoiselle Chanel herself—were the two artists she name-checked while citing the collection’s references. Dresses covered in delicately appliqued flowers mirror the colour palette of Monet’s watercolours (and evoke the feeling of being in the so-called ‘Monet room’ in the Musée de l’Orangerie), jackets blossom with English garden flowers, and whispy feather details evoke brush strokes.” —Grazia
At Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri wanted to “reconnect with ‘being present,’ through the awareness of the tactility of amazing hand-made textiles—that specialist, unseen chain of people in the fashion industry without which the practice of haute couture could not exist.
In a real way, her celebration of hand-loomed tweeds and the stitch-work carried out by embroiderers and silk manufacturers is the part haute couture will play in building back the post-pandemic economy on a larger scale—exactly as Christian Dior did with the explosion of fashion consumption in the post-war years of the 1950s.” —Vogue
At Balenciaga, “In a letter signed Love, Demna, Gvasalia explained that he felt it was his “creative duty” to bring couture back to the century-old Maison for the first time since 1967 when Cristóbal left the industry. Traces of his archives were everywhere, whether in the silhouettes or details like hand-embroidered polka-dot chiffon. Gvasalia painstakingly crafted a type of silk thread embroidery that moved just like the real thing when models silently glided down the runway, posing with traditional salon-style number cards. As for the faux crocodile, it apparently took thousands of hours to make via a computer program before it was pieced together by hand.” —W Magazine
