Paris Day Seven: When the Clothes Do the Talking

PARIS — Who needs brand storytelling, so trite and fabricated, when the dialogue between clothing and body can do all the talking? It happens rarely, but the seventh day of the Paris shows offered glimpses.

Urgency was on Balenciaga designer Demna’s mind this season: the kind of urgent desire for a new item that has been missing from fashion for so long. Ever the acute social commentator, Demna explored this sense of urgency through the symbols and standards adopted by tribes of everyday people. The show, presented within a narrow maze lined with black curtains, opened with formal suits, continued with variations on sportswear — including Uniqlo-style ultra-light down jackets and a collaboration with Puma — and ended with proper eveningwear. The outing marked the introduction of a new narrow silhouette served up in such a concise, straightforward way that it felt blunt. If fashion is ultimately about a transaction — we sell, you buy — this was transactional fashion at its best.

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Every once in a while, we get an auteur who out of nowhere rewires the game. That auteur, right now, is young Dutch designer Duran Lantink, whose star really rose this season. His show — held in an office building that houses fashion communications group The Independents and set to “The Great Learning (Paragraph 7)” by English composer Cornelius Cardew — was bookended by a woman wearing a prosthetic six-pack and a man wearing large prosthetic breasts. It’s the kind of stuff that’s used in cosplay, which, together with “freedom” was the only explanation Lantink offered.

Between these looks came tailoring and bombers with raised necklines and sloping shoulders, curtain-like skirts protruding on the hips, similarly cut “bareback” jeans which left the buttocks completely exposed. The way animal prints and tartans were mixed in, sometimes extending to body painting, was a new element to Lantink’s work, adding pattern stimulation to silhouette molding. Sure, there were hints of Rei Kawakubo, at least conceptually, but Lantink’s language is all his own: intensely sexual and eminently free, with a rawness that’s quintessentially Dutch.

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The storytelling at Valentino was so laden with layers of meaning, so blasting with visual and aural stimulation, so wonderfully executed on every level, that it overpowered the fashion, which anyway reflected Alessandro Michele’s familiar tendency to create crazy remixes of pieces that are vintage replicas culled from the archive or new stuff that already looks like vintage. Anyone searching for a new spin to Michele’s formula should stop. One has to accept that his signature is less about a new design vision and more about the way things are put together and staged. That’s his language.

Today, the rather spectacular, square-shaped show space was built like a club restroom, featuring models coming out of stalls. Did they pee? Did they take drugs? It’s anyone’s guess. They looked like a posse going out in various stages of undress, their public appearance a work in progress: wigs were missing, cheeks were lifted with tie rods, a bodysuit was left undone. In the show notes, Michele ruminated about the implosion of the space between the public and the private, surface and depth, and the meta-theater of getting dressed. But his words could barely be seen in the collection. The big question mark, however, is to what extent a carbon copy of his approach to Gucci can work for Valentino. “[Mr Valentino] was Apollonian, in love with perfection. I am Dionysiac,” Michele conceded.

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At Ottolinger, Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient were thinking about dressing as act of daily reinvention. Their work lends itself to a range of possibilities, and this outing felt particularly pointy and tense.

Meanwhile, Pelagia Kolotouros keeps bringing fashion credibility to Lacoste in ways that feel organic. Her latest show was her most convincing so far: a mix of pragmatism and glitz that gave off an early Prada Sport meets Miu Miu vibe. Elsewhere, Niccoló Pasqualetti was poetic as ever, in a deconstructed, gender-blurring way. He’s one with potential.