Paris shows feature a little of everything
Salma Hayek dresses in men’s clothes
Salma Hayek turned up at the very last minute for the Saint Laurent Paris show, attracting attention because she was dressed from head to toe in men’s clothes.
But the “Frida’’ star, who wore an androgynous dark smoking jacket, white shirt and menswear tie from a previous Saint Laurent menswear show, pulled the bold look off with style. She twinned it with a demure beehive.
Hayek was clearly invoking the legacy of the late, great Yves Saint Laurent, who broke the mold as one of the first designers to blur the lines between men and women’s dressing with “Le Smoking.’’
Wild luxury
Lanvin gave the rebellious punk boy of the street an injection of luxury.
Punk hairstyles, skinny ties, long think 1970s scarfs, bold prints and retro cyclamen pink blurred down the catwalk.
But Lanvin is about pure luxury: This rebel looked like he’d won the lottery and gone on a shopping spree, sporting shimmering, couture fabrics and jackets and pants with finessed tailoring.
Like Saint Laurent’s Slimane, who’s sought to rebel against established high fashion, Alber Elbaz and Lucas Ossendrijver here are also showing that street and couture can make a neat mix. And, like Saint Laurent, Lanvin’s silhouettes are getting skinnier.
Accessories were the name of the game here, with belts in metallic tassels, shoes and sneakers in cobalt blue, faridian green and burgundy and ties in pale blue and shocking pink. It was as if Elbaz were saying: “Le street, c’est chic.’’
Givenchy’s slam dunk
In a mock-up sports court, the ever-creative Tisci mixed up basketball with the Bauhaus to produce a smart but more low-key menswear collection than in previous seasons.
From behind a mesh, guests looked on to an empty basketball court with fluorescent piping marking out the lines on the floor.
A scoreboard was placed above the entrance where the first models started to walk out.
Tisci’s signature streetwise-yet-elegant looks took on the design of a basketball and abstracted it in curved lines on baggy, tailored pants, with double pleats in gray and black.
Shirts and thin sweaters too were printed with the curves and lines of basketball court markings.
Stoles in muskrat and opossum fur hung down and were banded like towels made to absorb a sportsman’s sweat.
But the show’s creative slam dunk was when the sporty patterns morphed into the abstract circular shapes and lines of the early 20th-century Bauhaus movement, which included artists Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky.
1930s gangster chic
South Korean designer Juun.J took the high-waists, pinstripes and broad shoulders of the 1930s and ’40s film noir gangster and supersized them.
The show’s title was Zootsuit, referring to the tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, long coated style popular within the African-American and Italian-American communities during the 1940s, and similar to the British Teddy boy.
Exaggerated collars and tubular arms were mixed with leather pants or a huge flat velvety knee length coat. But there was a perhaps an over-indulgent use of black.
Real gorilla fur coat causes a stir
Rabbit, chinchilla, astrakhan, mink and snow fox has all been seen in Paris. But gorilla?
American-born fashion icon and blogger Diane Pernet caused a stir by attending fashion week, incredibly, in a real gorilla fur coat.
After a photo of the black ankle-length vintage coat with long, black hair was tweeted on the @AP_Fashion account, it went viral and prompted strong reactions in the media. Pernet she said she was shocked when she woke up to anonymous hate mail.
“Maybe I should feel uncomfortable wearing this coat, but I don’t because I know the gorilla’s been dead for 80 years,” said Pernet, a vegetarian. “I’m not into killing animals for vanity’s sake. But I don’t feel politically incorrect wearing a vintage coat. I think you’d call that sustainable fashion,” she added.
She added that while she felt fine in Paris wearing the coat that was given to her by a friend, she always avoided wearing it in New York, where people look on the issue more harshly.
Gorillas are an endangered species, whose use for fur is illegal under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, passed in 1975. AP
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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