Paris Day Eight: The Case for Intimacy

PARIS — Big fashion spectacles are becoming a tired concept. In Paris, even the billion-dollar brands have scaled things down amid budgetary pressures and the sense that luxury has become too mass. Rei Kawakubo said on Saturday, “smaller is stronger.” It’s certainly cooler.

Louis Vuitton is the world’s largest luxury brand, but its show was dramatically smaller this season. Getting to the venue — a building on the side of the Gare du Nord that harks back to 19th-century rail travel — was deliriously complicated, however, requiring guests, who were driven to an undisclosed location in a fleet of cars, to arrive more than one hour early. To be sure, smaller shows have a warmth that mega-productions lack, but there’s always something a little chilly about the vibe at Vuitton no matter the size of the staging.

Travel is at the core of the brand, which began as a trunk maker, and Nicolas Ghesquière sought to activate this heritage while exploring the constant flows of energy and emotion that course through a train station. “So many crossroads converge in the station, in every era and stage of life. What really interested me was the concourse — its eclecticism,” he said.

Eclectic it was: characters that seemed to be from different eras and walks of life marched along in pieces that looked like complicated collages, blueprints for a collision of sportswear and seduction. A few bore prints culled from Kraftwerk’s seminal album “Trans-Europe Express,” which added subtext to the whole story: Ghesquière’s vision seems to be stuck in a place quite close to Kraftwerk, a pointy and sharp fantasy of the 1980s that’s captivating aesthetically and technically, but computer-like in terms of its emotional resonance. To be fair, today’s collection was exquisite, but the liveliness of a train station got lost in abstraction.

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Marine Serre, now in her 30s, is maturing and so is her brand, which has taken over the ground floor windows at Galeries Lafayette. While she has previously shown in stadiums, markets and other large outdoor spaces, this season Serre opted for the cozier grandeur of the Monnaie de Paris, one of the oldest mints in the world. The collaboration included the issuing of a special medal, engraved with Serre’s crescent moon logo on one side and the designer’s profile on the other, recalling French national hero Marianne. As a piece of branding, it was probably a bit self-congratulatory but served as a frame for a collection that was, once again, about female empowerment, something Serre knows a thing or two about. Afterall, she runs an independent company at which she is CEO and creative director, a fashion rarity.

As for the clothes, the more Serre matures, the more her aesthetic leaves behind the layered futurism/barbarism of her beginnings to embrace something, well, more mature but a bit depthless. The confident sexuality of the show channeled 1980s Versace, leaving one longing for the multicultural texture that once played a bigger role in animating the brand.

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Though held in a large, raw space on Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, the Sacai show had a sense of intimacy to it, which is part of the Chitose Abe magic. She operates in her own bubble, but she’s also a fashion force to be reckoned with: an auteur who has the rare ability to turn her experimental urge into clothing that is both inventive and practical, expressive and personal, as well as extremely feminine but in a commanding, unmistakably unsugary way.

The use of hybrids, a founding design principle for Abe, remained front and centre, but came in new ways: this season, for instance, jackets and coats were spliced and opened, sprouting large panels, scarves and blanket-like protrusions. Abe worked with the notion of wrapping, and although she described the results as “sweet and cozy” her woman came across as a warrior with a soft spot for sequins and Man Ray prints. It was both on point and right to the point.

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Female empowerment has always been top of mind for Gabriela Hearst, who channels this through a design language rooted in both aesthetic reduction and maximum play with material and craft. Her proposition is quite narrow, especially in terms of shape — long, vertical and slightly unforgiving — but what makes it sing is the fact that Hearst proposes a replica of herself on the catwalk. Most of the looks in today’s show were worn with cowboy boots that screamed Gabriela. In sum, the outing, which came with a goddess theme, was a captivating rendition of Hearst tropes: sharp tailoring, textural knitwear, tactile leathers, intarsia.

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At Zimmermann, the juxtaposition of flowing shapes and lace with slightly masculine protective pieces had something Chloé-esque about it. Truth is, however, sisters Nicky and Simone Zimmermann, who are conquering the world from Sydney, were doing this before Chemena Kamali’s Chloé revamp. Their take on sexy romantic and boho has an Australian brand of sassiness that’s personal, but to show in Paris, that alone is not enough. The Zimmermans need a stronger signature, but the good news is there’s lots to work with.