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PARIS — Paris fashion week ended Tuesday in a sea of moss. Nature — and our place in it — was a recurring theme this season.
Louis Vuitton
At Louis Vuitton, synthetic moss covered enormous parallelepipeds and prisms by artist Jeremy Hindle. The set provided the backdrop for designer Nicolas Ghesquière’s latest vision for the brand and its DNA in travel: a collage of folk tropes that was rendered blurry and more than a little abstract by its sheer scope. At times, costume designer Danilo Donati’s work for Pasolini came to mind. Ghesquière started from a stimulating assumption: traditional clothing is a response to the confrontation between humanity and the elements. It’s the same the world over — North, South, East and West. Such cross-cultural humanism softened Ghesquière’s aesthetic. There were Azerbaijani shepherds cloaks — portable homes, in fact — conical headdresses, Mongolian, Coptic and Byzantine echoes, all blended together in an ahistorical, transversal melting pot. The ghoulish theatrics and dusty palette of Rick Owens could be felt here and there and it was all a lot to digest, but the humanity that ran through the show made it relevant.
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Miu Miu
The moss at Miu Miu was real and fragrant, but the walls of the room were carpeted in floral red brocade and giant mirrors, as if to suggest a forest inside a palace. The environment, suspended between nature and artifice, welcomed a veritable posse of gnomes dressed in a panoply of Miu Miu and Prada tropes from the mid- to late-1990s, Miu Miu being the label where Miuccia Prada happily returns to her own history to remix it — in this case, tapping needlepunching, lab uniforms and a raw lingerie feeling. What struck this critic was how small the bodies looked, the clothes they wore, washed and battered, at times shabby and yet always full of dignity, resting as if they were a tad too big, too short, the trousers always too long. Miuccia Prada said she found grace and strength in the smallness of the relationship between humanity and the vastness of nature. Metaphorically, even the lack of embellishment, which was limited to small details or clusters on Young Marmor hats with earflaps, gave the outing a diminutive vibe. It all made for a fine show but the jolt of electricity one expects from Mrs Prada was missing.
