Rosie Scott Blog about Women

Compromise may be an art in both politics and business, but in fashion — or, to be fair, in a fashion show, which is (theoretically anyway) the purest expression of a designer’s idea of fashion — it can be poison.

There’s no place for wishy-washiness on the runway. Give away a sleeve here, a hemline there, and what have you got? Generic. If you expect people to buy your clothes, they need to buy your idea of them — the future them — first. The rest is translation.

But the “vision thing,” as George H.W. Bush once called it, is increasingly rare on the ground, especially when it comes to old names inherited by new designers. How do you even begin to negotiate with history? It’s a losing battle from the start.

Or so it seemed, anyway, judging from the relatively limp debut ready-to-wear collection by John Galliano at Maison Margiela. Mr. Galliano is, of course, dealing with two histories — his own as the ultimate fashion cautionary tale, the former celebrated Dior designer fallen from grace, and that of the cultlike brand he has assumed — so his task is twice as tough. In going through the motions of both, however, and trying to reconcile them into something transformative, he did justice to neither.

There was some classic Galliano here: bias-cut shredded sheer gowns, sweeping 1970s greatcoats, models scuttling along like urchins clutching paper bags in crazy orange wigs. Some familiar Margiela there: inside-out backwards gowns made from silk linings, tails of feathers flowing from a waist; Mr. Galliano’s decision to eschew the traditional designer bow at the end of the show and instead maintain a Garbo/Margiela-like silence (somewhat undercut by the existence of show notes — Mr. Margiela never explained). There were even some highly commercial bits throughout: cropped brocade trousers, a bunch of cute miniskirts.

But most of it has been seen before, and in more concentrated form; nowhere was there anything that suggested a new identity, or indeed any specific identity at all, for the brand or those who might buy it.

Once upon a time Mr. Galliano brought a wholly specific viewpoint to fashion, and presumably he feels he has more to say (otherwise why come back?), but it was unclear from this exactly what more he has in mind. Just as it was unclear from Guillaume Henry’s debut at Nina Ricci how he sees that brand.

As “a timeless wardrobe” anchored in “immediate reality” claimed the show notes, but ever since Nicolas Ghesquière’s debut at Louis Vuitton “timeless wardrobe” has become a hackneyed fashion term. These days everyone is paying lip service to the timeless wardrobe. It’s gotten to the point where you want to throw up your hands and shout, “Gimme a fad!”

In any case, Mr. Henry did not. He provided instead perfectly accessible pieces with a whiff of gardenia: lace tees and matching pencil skirts, or sequined versions of the same; oversize pea coats; navy sailor pants and cropped camel jean jackets; cream multi-textured coats and princess pumps.

It was not remotely controversial, despite being held at the Centre Pompidou with all the radical revisionism that implies. Even a sheer lace dress with thigh-high stretch leather boots under a boucle coat just seemed like ersatz belle du jour. As a result, while it might have been l’air du temps, it was not l’air du demain.

At least at Balenciaga, the designer Alexander Wang is visibly struggling to balance what was with what he wants, though he has not, as yet, found an equilibrium. If last season was largely a statement of his intent, this time he swung too far the other way, with Balenciaga-referential (and reverential) cocoon coats and balloon hobble skirts dominating sportier graffiti-sprayed jacquard jackets and wrap skirts.

They were cooled-up, unquestionably, via hard-edged industrial decoration such as a row of staples up the side of a tuxedo pant, little pearls of metal forming the raised collar of a rounded coat and evening T-shirts of articulated steel paired with floral brocades.

But the problem (aside from the hobble skirts, which simply have no place on a contemporary runway) was that in paying obeisance to the shapes of the past Mr. Wang lost sight of the point of the past, which was single-minded allegiance to a precise idea of how women should look. That’s the underlying legacy of the house.

It’s the ethos, anyway, of Phoebe Philo at Céline, who effectively shrugged off any inheritance in favor of her own weltanschauung when she arrived in 2008 and has been refining her lens ever since. Witness the “tatty glamour” of this season, as reflected in black and white boiled wool lace trousers and dresses, flowers punched out at random like moth-eaten holes; backless ribbed knits (sometimes with trompe l’oeil built-in bras) held together with a strap at the spine over undervests; leather coats with drawstring waists; and tritone silk slipdresses, a chain of fur snowballs tossed over a shoulder.

“I hadn’t done it before,” shrugged the designer backstage when asked why. “It’s one of the ways I question myself as a woman, and a designer.”

Her name may not be on the label, but it’s her house, and she is building it — just as a designer such as Haider Ackermann took his signature Byronic romance a step further for fall by mixing in a clash of prints (tweed and leopard and dots and race car checks) as well as visible stitching like scars across slouchy black trousers, and asymmetric pleated skirts, the threads left to dangle in the wind.

Ditto Junya Watanabe, whose schtick is a unique ability to combine the basics of fashion (the white shirt, the easy man’s trouser, capes) with technical experimentation on the far edge: outerwear transformed via pyramid folds, honeycombed pleats and accordion layers into something resembling a child’s paper fortune-teller or a sea urchin’s spikes; slithery leathers that looked like the carapace of a giant squid; capes like fishermen’s nets, the woman caught underneath, and millefeuilles of hemlines or necklines on simple T-shirt dresses that expanded and contracted with a step.

What was it exactly? Who knows. The metaphor is in the eye of the beholder. Besides, it doesn’t matter: The appeal goes straight to the head.

And while it sounds outré it was, in fact, perfectly engineered, not just in its geometry, but in the counterpoise between the familiar (the sequin jeans are a no-brainer) and the exotic. As was Jun Takahashi’s meditation on transformation and mutation at Undercover, where men’s overcoats had hemlines so long they spilled over the raised runway to sweep the floor, and baseball jackets had the graceful drape of a sac dress.

Denim came veiled in white; lab coats were embroidered with a dagger to the heart, and backed in shrouded rose print (complete with thorns); Renaissance faces and figures enlarged and overlaid on a chiaroscuro of skirts and shirts; and blood-red broken glass decorated a white tuxedo at the end.

The clothes, splicing different sartorial species and aesthetics into one, dared the viewer to face (literally, in case of those portraits) the contemporary quest for perfection and the pain involved. It’s not a comfortable challenge, but it was too elegantly posed to ignore.

Arguably, Mr. Ackermann, Mr. Watanabe and Mr. Takahashi have the advantage of being forced from the beginning to articulate their own identities. They don’t have founder-separation anxiety to negotiate.

And yet, as Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons showed, on some level breaking away — how to do it — is a topic with which everyone contends.

“The ceremony of separation” was Ms. Kawakubo’s gnomic explanation for the shrouds of bulbous white cotton that transformed the wearers into figures leaving home with their possessions on their back (and front, and sides, and head), the black lace lumps and bumps of wrapped limbs, as though part had been cut off, the layers upon layer of white lace dresses, sometimes with a doll-size shape disappearing into the folds, sometimes with black helmet-like appendages expanding outwards, the black cagelike shroud that seemed to imprison in isolation.

While the expression of her subject may have been singular, however, in its extremity — its unwillingness to sacrifice its point on the altar of wearability (that happens in the showroom, where the derivations go all the way to T-shirt level) — the show described a universal idea.

It was no coincidence it was held in the Galerie de Minéralogie at the Natural History Museum, surrounded by the remains of former eras. Everyone has to deal with letting go: of people, jobs, the past.

This is no easy process — witness the contortions at Margiela, Ricci et. al. to hang on to a vestigial form — but there is beauty in acceptance. It comes with the chance to move on. To advance.

We could use that, right about now.

You should also see:

http://ezinepot.com/lights-fabric-action-at-fashion-week/

http://facebriz.com/blogs/post/8082