The Row shows can sometimes seem like a mirage that appeared on an early morning in Paris, and then evaporated—there being no evidence of it having existed as an event on one’s phone or the internet from other people’s phones. Or this time, not even in photos from the live presentation which are normally offered by the company some time later.
Instead they’ve sent this black and white lookbook. Photographed much in the style Parisian couture houses began to provide for clients in the 1930s, each outfit is shot from the front, back, and in profile. No vibe happens by accident here: there are indeed vintage couture references in the collection. While removing themselves as far as possible from the noise and palaver of fashion week, were the sisters placing themselves into the conversation around the changes at Dior, Chanel, Balenciaga? Feeling the competitive urge to up their game, to prove themselves further?
They weren’t saying that. They never say anything, ever.
Yet somehow, this hermetically sealed design chamber was echoing some of the silhouettes, the volumes, the textures, and materials we’d seen elsewhere—and prefiguring others—while making better sense of them in their architecturally refined way. I’m relieved to say that even though I’d omitted to take a pen with me to draw in the notebook that The Row provides us (phone use being banned by them), the excellence of this collection got etched on my memory. Just by sitting there and dumbly looking.
One was reminded of the aesthetic reductionism behind it from the start: a slim matte black silk A-line tunic, to the knee, over slim fluted pants, worn with pumps with a heel, and (so American this!) a black cashmere sweater slung about the neck like a scarf. Later, a white poplin dress was another harbinger of the same tunic-like simplicity we saw being heralded by Pieter Mulier at Alaïa.
Then, panniers. A full, paneled skirt in washed silk faille with a frontal volume at the hip. You couldn’t quite tell whether it was held up by a hoop or padding, or just by the model shoving her hands in its pockets. Hands in pockets and a plain black T-shirt—how American a way is that to be casually, awfully grand? And to give a knowing side-glance to the fact that Marie Antoinette-ism is a subject du saison around Paris fashion?
There was a washed satin bubble like a hacked-into latter-day Cristobal Balenciaga dress, open to show a satin lining layer at the back. A glorious black double duchesse silk satin sash-train whose grandeur might’ve flown off a Charles James dress, to land around the waist of a plain pair of white chinos and a double layered jersey tank. (All hail Helmut Lang in the New York ’90s!)
It is always the American way of fashion to make the complicated simple. In this show, you also saw Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen lend their calm and beautiful touch to all the messy business with strands of silk yarn and hairy texture that’s been going on elsewhere in European fashion. It can all be reduced, you see, to something adjacent to a white tank or a black sweater!
It’s too bad you can’t pick up these subtleties so much in these photographs. Although it’s plain to see that all this has been done in the context of The Row wardrobe: the raincoat resource, the place for pants, the haven of the perfect white day-to-night shirt. It’s almost funny that the Olsens withdrew themselves so far from the noise and the drama of this all-action Paris season. Because on almost every one of the salient topics, they said what they said.
