The silhouette of the drop-waisted wide-panniered robe de style dress of the mid-1920s is permanently associated with Jeanne Lanvin. So is a particular dusty shade of blue. Both of these were all the rage in Paris, along with the excitement over Art Deco a century ago. Mulling over all of this archival evidence led Peter Copping on the path to his second Lanvin collection.
Strangely, the robe de style was a 20th-century reinterpretation of 18th-century court dress, and interest in this shape has come around all over again in all of the Marie Antoinette-ish corsetry and panniers we’ve been watching swish past on runways this season. Copping’s reinterpretations topped and tailed his spring show. A remix of Visage’s 1980 hit “Fade to Grey” on the soundtrack seemed to symbolize the precious antique quality of the dresses he’s been pulling out of the archive. The floppy, casualized attitude of his silk spring robes de style came from washing them, he said backstage: “When the pieces come in from the archive beautifully packed in these amazing boxes, the quality of them is beautiful because they are aged.”
Though it’s the fashion cat-nip element that will guarantee fashion shoots and celebrity wears next summer, the Lanvin robe de style was only a part of Copping’s eclectic line up. There were sinuous knit dresses—more from the ’30s, though pretty dateless—and scarf prints draped into other ones. Jazz Age geometric graphics were schematized diamond-pattern embroideries.
The use of ribbons to weave and tie, or allowed to flow as fringes reminded some of us fleetingly of the late greatly missed Alber Elbaz, who gave Lanvin back its fashion mojo in the aughts and 2010s.
Copping works his menswear into his women’s show. The connection between the two were the men’s head-wraps—a nod toward the male principal dancers of the contemporaneous Ballets Russe, perhaps. But really, the Lanvin men’s business is in relaxed-but-smart tailoring. Copping’s summer options—soft suits with long duster coats—kept up that side of the brand’s reputation.
