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One of the tasks of writing a roundup of the spring 2023 couture season is to identify trends. More of those later, but trends are somewhat superfluous to the overarching narrative of the week that just passed, which was about how we perceive reality. There’s no better way to explain the situation than with the title Rene Magritte gave to his most famous painting, The Treachery of Images, (aka Ceci n’est pas une pipe). To put it plainly, we cannot assume that what we see is true.
Exhibit one: Schiaparelli’s menagerie, a perfect storm of celebrity and craftsmanship. Unlike the feline protagonist of A Lion in Paris (a gorgeous book by Beatrice Alemagna about a lonely lion who roams the city and goes unnoticed despite his mane and his roar), this was clearly an attention-getting move that leaned more toward the literal or hyperreal than the surrealism the house is known for, though the entirely faux animal heads were in keeping with Elsa Schiaparelli’s penchant for seasonal themes.
In February 1938 Schiaparelli presented her famous Circus collection, pieces of which are currently on display in the “Shocking!” Exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Fashion, too, is a traveling show, and this season—at Chanel, Schiaparelli, Armani Privé, and Valentino—ringmasters and circus animals appeared in the collections, as did harlequins and the sad clown Pierrot. There’s no doubt we are living through a challenging and transformative moment, and that fact weighed heavily on some designers’ minds.
“We’re living at a crossroads which makes for anxious times,” Alexandre Vauthier generalized. Iris van Herpen, for her part, got specific, explaining that her presentation was “an ode to the demonstrations in Iran.” In talking to our reviewers many couturiers felt there was something like a moral imperative in creation, as Ronald van der Kemp opined: “As designers we have so much influence on people’s behavior, because fashion is such a force today. We have to use it responsibly, positively as a driver of change.”
One way to give viewers and clients a “change” is through escapism. But if Valentino’s Club Couture celebrated the loucheness of nightlife, it also was an extension of Pierpaolo Piccioli’s humanistic approach. “I love the idea of a club, but it’s a club for today,” he said, expanding, I’m “thinking of inclusivity as welcoming people for who they are, and who they want to be. So it’s an invitation to be free to be what you want.”
At Christian Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri put a spotlight on Josephine Baker, but rather than focus on the entertainer/activist’s costumes, the designer looked at pictures of Baker at work in Dior suits. The result was a sober collection with a focus on tailoring and the longer hemlines we started seeing at pre-fall. The evening looks, many in lamé, were also relatively restrained.
The ’30s silhouettes in the couture collections could be connected to the looming recession, but they probably also owe something to the “Shocking!” exhibition; the 1930s were the years in which Schiaparelli flourished. The brash ’80s, referenced by Piccioli at Valentino and Alexandre Vauthier, who paid homage to the elegance of Grace Jones , felt more immediate and relevant. As we continue to grapple with issues that defined that era, not least of all its great divisions in wealth, it’s not surprising that we see some of the exaggeration of that time reemerging in culture and fashion. Bret Easton Ellis, whose work defined those years, has a new novel out, The Shards, and another MAD exhibition, “Années 80. Mode, design et graphisme en France,” seems to be exerting quite an influence. Might yet another Parisian exhibition, “Or by Yves Saint Laurent,” explain the overall gilding of the collections? Or is the French word for gold, remember.
Van der Kemp has a unique take on preciousness: “Trash is the new gold,” said the designer who presented his bold, collaged designs on a cast of extrovert friends. Olivier Saillard’s “Moda Povera” presentation demonstrated that emotion and connection are far more priceless than metal or currency. By applying couture techniques borrowed from the likes of Madame Grès and Mainbocher he transformed humble pieces from his late mother’s wardrobe into marvelous designs with which he dressed and undressed the model Axelle Doue, stopping now and again to gently brush back her hair with a heart-rending tenderness. Doue, who modeled for Grès, looked like a fashion illustration come to life, which seems especially on point as the upcoming Karl Lagerfeld exhibition at the Costume Institute uses the designer’s drawings as an organizing principle.
Saillard and Doue demonstrated that the everyday can become transcendent. Like the Fendi and Viktor Rolf shows, their performance dealt with perception through gesture and touch, and asked us to reflect on how we construct identity through visuals and the act of getting dressed. The digital revolution has created “a disconnect between what we see, and the physicality of the product,” Rolf Snoeren said, while Viktor Horsting described our world as “absurd.” The duo subverted the icon of haute couture, princess gowns, by reorienting them on the body, raising questions like, do clothes make the woman? And where is the self located—in the body, its dressed presentation, or in the heart and soul? At Fendi, Jones was looking at a draped archival piece by Karl Lagerfeld in the house’s archive. Many of his dresses fell away from the body, and were made of “fabric” that was actually leather—“not that you’d ever know it, unless you were wearing it,” our reviewer observed.
Haider Ackermann, meanwhile, visited the past to bring it forward. The guest designer at Jean Paul Gaultier this season, he seamlessly worked motifs from the archive into designs that reflected his own point of view, and reflected on the craft of the metier as well. What looked like fur or fringe on some of the pieces were humble pins. If the eye is an unreliable narrator, what are we left with? Maybe touch, which requires physical interaction with an object or garment. Getting dressed is one such experience. Made by legions of “petites mains,” the spring 2023 couture collections were a sublime expression of fashion’s physicality, which is their ultimate truth.
Circus, Mastered
Park Avenue Princesses and Power Brokers
Under Cover
Gold Mine
Lightness of Being
Zen Couture
Right as Rain
Going to Pieces
Body Stockings
His-Story
