With a fall collection entitled Performer, Alain Paul continued his meditation on how the clothes we choose to wear illustrate the role we play in the theater of life.
As a former dancer, the designer knows a thing or two about the dualities of dressing on-stage and off. Alluding to his years of training in contemporary ballet, he explained that he wanted to create an urban wardrobe that would also convey, for example, a suspended nanosecond between the moment a dancer jumps and lands. In that spirit, a long, draped greige skirt was one of several looks that seemed to twist and shift on the body, capturing spontaneous movement mid-pivot. That idea was echoed in knits wrapped to mimic “a rehearsal-moment feeling.”
Though rife with references to the world of dance—an artfully scrunched silver skirt in laminated jersey evoked the mirror in the ballet room, a bolero recalled a dancer’s cardigan, and so forth—this collection also felt like the fledgling label had taken a leap or two ahead. That hardly escaped notice by the powers that be: Alainpaul is among the 20 semi-finalists presenting at the LVMH Prize showroom on the Avenue Montaigne this week.
Whether one is dance-literate or not, there were plenty of real-world clothes here, among them well-tailored overcoats and a leather jacket pieced together from five vintage finds. For exuberant types, a formal shirt, in pink with an exaggerated, detachable placket offered freedom to button up at random. Skirts with trailing ruffles, a reference to Pina Bausch, were made to be “not pretty, not beautiful, but feminine and emancipated,” as if caught in a state of becoming.
Other pieces had a more couture construction, for example an asymmetrical, padded skirt engineered like a crinoline. But the showstoppers were tactile, textured skirts, tops and dresses knitted and knotted from a trove of dancing tights—one model, Kennah Lau, even lent a hand by knitting the very dress she donned for the runway. That kind of wit and resourcefulness deserves an encore.
