Couture’s Cross-Generational Masterclass

“Take a moment to consider what it means to you to live a truly happy life.”

Demna played a meditation tape as the soundtrack for the reveal of his latest couture show for Balenciaga. He claimed it was all part of his “opening up.” He was embracing himself. You could feel it in the collection. Where his past couture shows have been all rigour and precision, more in keeping with the notion that haute couture is some kind of spiritual discipline (especially as practised by the likes of Cristóbal Balenciaga), this one was his “happy life,” his world of subcultures, skaters and metalheads and grunge kids (FANGYE is a thing!), transmogrified by technical expertise into lifeforms that were fundamentally alien to the world of the couture salon. Like, revolution was in the air. Oh how I wish!

“The only way to do couture at Balenciaga is to connect with history,” Demna said after the show. That accounted for ten months of experiment, trying to decode Cristóbal and then fusing it with his own vocabulary, striking a balance between then and now. It was mesmerising watching the results of that effort, Demna trying to transmute Cristóbal’s signatures. Like the ¾ sleeve which would once have shown off a client’s bejewelled bracelets. Here, on a polo shirt, a parka or a bomber jacket, it had a different resonance. Then there was the never-ending drama of Cristóbal’s profile silhouette (the cocoon was probably the most famous). Demna upped that drama, artfully alchemising a pile of puffer jackets into a Cristóbal infanta, for example. And the maestro’s hats? They were Demna’s greatest challenge. “I hate hats,” he said. “Such a useless object, but such an important object to make a good couture silhouette.” So he showed those flying saucer hats which most spoke to the classic Avedon/Penn moment in haute fashion photography. At first, there were feathers – so far, so haute – but then he reclaimed the UFO for himself by draping it in a t-shirt.

He said, “Lots of details and layers in the show make it Couture/Demna/Balenciaga, like there’s this kind of love triangle that I try to explore in all of these challenges.” It felt to me that the most gratifying one for him to explore must have been materials. Cristóbal pushed limits in his fabric development. What would he have made of Demna’s dress moulded from melted plastic bags? Or crushed aluminium foil? Or belts? Or the upcycled t-shirts, jeans and sweatshirts lined with silk scuba satin so that they would maintain their shape as they were collaged into assaults on couture orthodoxy? Would Cristóbal have recognised a fellow iconoclast? (How would he have felt about Martin Margiela? I also wondered.) He, after all, insisted on showing his clothes on the women from his hometown in northern Spain, ordinary townsfolk, not couture swans, because that’s how he felt he could prove he could make any woman beautiful. And Demna had his own cast of similarly idiosyncratic characters. His models were intricately rendered in oil on t-shirts that mimicked the kind of items you’d buy in a stall at the Reading Festival. Now, hell would have frozen over before Cristóbal Balenciaga listened to sludge metal, but he might have understood the peculiar purity of Demna’s gesture.

Cristóbal’s fabric breakthrough was a stiff gauzy silk called gazar. Demna wanted so badly to close his show with a salute to gazar but no one makes it anymore. He found the machines, but anyone who knew how to use them was too old or too dead. So, 30 minutes before showtime, he wrapped a model in 47 metres of nylon to create a simalcrum. Nothing constructed, just an endless swirl of fabric. It was possibly the truest-to-himself thing Demna has ever done. “Nobody really needs couture to be honest,” he conceded. “To me, it’s an experience of wearing clothes. And I want to bring it even further into that, almost a performance that only exists for the 15 minutes of this event.” The ephemerality was the point. It was akin to the second-skin flocked leather sheath that Demna muse Eliza Douglas wore immediately before. At her throat was a necklace from the Balenciaga archive, most precious of all archives and rarely accessible to mere mortals. To honour this moment, Demna essentially created a mobile display unit. You see it once, and then it’s gone.

The obsession is, on its own terms, magnificent. Monumental. It’s a sensibility that Demna and Cristóbal clearly share. But I can only imagine how massively demanding it is, and was. One day, the Spanish legend just locked his door and walked away.

Balenciaga Autumn/Winter 2024 Haute Couture (Spotlight/Launchmetrics.com)

Speaking of gazar, Nicolas di Felice was looking for some for his guest spot at Jean Paul Gaultier Couture and he managed to find it in the same storage facility where Simone Rocha was able to locate rare, precious and beautiful things for her stint last season. Gaultier is clearly the gift that keeps on giving, which testifies not only to his enduring influence as a paragon of fashion independence for young designers but also the multi-layered richness of his body of work. Every guest has found something very distinct to focus on as they celebrate Gaultier in this visionary initiative, and none of them has been remotely similar.

Di Felice, currently creative director for Courreges, is one of the brightest young stars on the Paris fashion scene at the moment. I wondered whether Gaultier recognised that he is surrounded by the same cultish fervour that JPG once sparked when he chose him as the latest guest. If not, he would surely have seen it from his front row seat, where the audience response at the end of Di Felice’s show said everything about how much he is loved.

Where his predecessors drew on Gaultier’s tailoring or eroticism or romance or wilfulness or Madonna-hood, Di Felice took a daringly reductive approach. He said he drew inspiration from the extravagantly multifocal Gaultier‘s 1989 dance track “How To Do That,” whose video by Jean Baptiste Mondino defined its moment as succinctly as anything Madonna did. “I tried to find my own way to do that,” Di Felice said. “I wanted to show it was not only about a show and a sparkle.”

He likes to keep things simple in his work at Courreges. There isn’t much decoration in his work. But Di Felice accepted that couture meant embellishment, embroidery. So he dived in … and quickly dived out when he realised that just wasn’t him. His eureka moment came when he was looking at Gaultier’s corsetry, when he checked how punk, how metal the hook and eye closures were. They looked like studs to him. From that, he was able to build a collection. “We could attach the sleeve of a trenchcoat to the hook and eye. We could drape on them. We could attach everything.” Hook and eye became a rationale for articulated looks. They were a decoration too.

Geometry has been Di Felice’s lodestone at Courreges. He carried it over to Gaultier with the first looks that were basically a rectangle with sleeves. Draped dresses were a rectangle of silk jersey wrapped around the body. The climax of the show was a set of second-skin dresses, some with that suggestive pouch at the front that has triggered the sexual fantasies of Di Felicettes. Seeing that JPG is a past master of sexual suggestivity, I would love to know his take. “I love opposites,” Di Felice said, “to pervert a point of view that exists already.” But there was a peculiar chemistry in this collection which hinted at a compatibility that was perhaps unexpected.

Jean Paul Gaultier Autumn/Winter 2024 Haute Couture (Spotlight/Launchmetrics.com)

When Giorgio Armani turns 90 in two weeks, he’ll be celebrating in St Tropez with 25 of his nearest and dearest. But on Tuesday night, he was taking a bow after his latest couture show and you were left marvelling at how a man on the brink of his tenth decade seems to be as driven and creative as he was when he turned fashion on its head 50 years ago. Armani called his collection Perle, and the pearl with all its cultural associations (the show notes mentioned the moon, water, wisdom, purity, love) was a particularly appropriate analogue for clothes which shimmered like moonlight on water or sparkled like stars in the night sky.

Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” was on the soundtrack, and the collection had a languorous monochrome glamour that conveyed another time, another place. Armani’s fashion lexicon has always drawn on movies. Here, the lustrous black velvet and white satin, the sheen of gold and opalescent platinum, evoked a golden age of the screen. And it was the pearls that were the stars. They were everywhere: in wraps, in elegant sheaths, in strands draping the back of a black velvet suit. Black pearls yoked black lace and satin columns. A single large pearl clasped the shoulder of a bias-cut tulle confection. A sheer net tank dress was studded with them. They made a gratifying clicking sound as they moved. ASMR couture!

The evolution of Privé has established that couture means eveningwear for Armani. But, from the sculpted jacquard jacket and flowing pants combination that is a signature look for him to the endless glittering iterations of long and lean, this collection felt especially, even unusually, serene for him. Maybe it was his heartfelt way of calling for calm in the world, using the platform he knows best. The man can, after all, speak with the wisdom of the ages.