Charles Anastase s world is unsettling. Its population is girls (never women; they never reach that age), girls whose supernaturally elongated proportions are stretched still farther by long dresses and treacherously high platform shoes. Its atmosphere is a mix of the proper and the perverse: Cue the schoolgirl blouse that is buttoned neatly up to the neck and pinned with a pussycat brooch—but that is also entirely see-through. And its culture is Gallic, almost to the point of vaudeville. Anastase comes on like the professional Frenchman abroad, all zese-zose zest for la mode, with Pierrot collars and a Bardot sweater dress slipping off a model s shoulders on the runway, and Serge Gainsbourg s songs all over the soundtrack.
The Gainsbourg backing track made one think that the girls, with their heavy-rimmed glasses, mussed bobs, and pretty pouts, might be modeled after the singer s onetime girlfriend Jane Birkin—that is, until Anastase s right hand, Valentine Fillol-Cordier, popped up backstage with heavy-rimmed glasses ("Blind since 5," she said cheerily), mussed bob, and pretty pout. Her sweetness infected Anastase in a positive way: drop waists, flower-studded netting, sheerness that was perversely demure. Perhaps it helped that he built his collection on a dotted Swiss fabric called plume matis, which brought delicacy to maîtresse-y pencil skirts at the same time as it underlined the skewed classicism of his vision. (As did the silver brocade pieces, simultaneously ancien régime and rock n roll.) Anastase s world may be unsettling, but it is remarkably consistent—and that s called a signature.
