The best show of the Paris season thus far (even, possibly, the whole fashion season) took place under an island-style thatched-roof gazebo in the formal gardens of the National Archives, with a campaign button on every seat displaying a quote from “Paris is Burning,” the 1990 documentary about the New York ballroom scene: “If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.”
Yeah, that combination of references didn’t make a lot of sense to anyone who was actually in the room either. But then, as this collection made clear, that’s the surprise — and what’s starting to seem like the genius — of Michael Rider’s Celine.
“I’m really turned on by, I guess, tension,” he said backstage after the show, as waiters poured Champagne into a tower of crystal glasses. Specifically, the tension between apparent opposites that currently seems like the modern condition. In that ostensibly uncomfortable place, Rider doesn’t bother trying to find resolution; instead, he finds chic. Bingo.
It’s not about a silhouette — he’s not inventing a new shape or way to see the body — so much as an attitude and a way to dress. If Jean Seberg went rummaging in Catherine Deneuve’s closet, then grabbed some ham sandwiches and a Lee Child thriller and hopped a high-speed train to Biarritz with a pit stop for a French 75 at La Colombe d’Or, this might be the result.
Throw on an oversize black pantsuit, add a filament-thin chain at the waist and let your untucked shirt, trimmed with a random assortment of little baubles, peek out at the bottom. Cinch an enormous belt with an even bigger buckle atop a knit column dress.
Pair a broad-shouldered cherry red turtleneck shirt with some pleated ruby red paper-bag-waist trousers and a soft, lipstick red bag, so they all almost match — but not quite. Wear a little leather jacket over bandanna print balloon cargo pants with a beaded necklace. Toss a liquid asymmetric Fortuny-pleated silver tunic over silver trousers, but let it slide off one shoulder.
The effect is cosmopolitan without looking as if it is trying too hard; Frenchier, in the ineffable way of a perfectly tied silk scarf, and more polished than Rider’s work has been in the past, but with a sort of American ease and accessibility. Maybe the best word for it is glamorous. Not the old-fashioned kind preserved in amber at Saint Laurent, but a new, more contemporary and complicated version of the idea. One that is starting to reach critical mass.
Julian Klausner at Dries Van Noten described the mood, in his best collection yet, as “the desire to feel done up, simply because you want to,” but not in a way that is too forced or controlled.
In a way that, for example, mix-mashes leopard print and Watteau watercolors; schoolgirl stripes and elaborately beaded pastel separates — the stuff that might constitute a wardrobe for a movie star of the mind, but all worn at the same time and in seemingly the wrong ways. (He even threw in some prints of fictionalized movie posters for good measure.) Which, counter-intuitively, proved absolutely right.
Acknowledging the fun of the fancy while refusing to take it too seriously is what makes it modern. See, also, Junya Watanabe’s exhilarating juxtaposition of moto unitards and the archaic totems of the Ritz regime — diamonds and bling, faux Chanel jackets and pearls, camel trench coats and mermaid gowns — impaled on the spikes of punk-era subversion.
A pregnant, and seemingly highly amused, Ciara in a burgundy bodysuit and what looked like an entire crystal chandelier suspended from its own hard hat pretty much embodied the spirit.
Which was summed up, as is her wont, by Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, in her usual collection koan (the brief and enigmatic statement she issues post-show for everybody to interpret as they will): “When royal life and everyday life become one.” When basics — pinstripes, polka dots, gingham and army green — inflate and explode into palatial forms, expelling feathers and brocade. And when, in perhaps the most unexpected development of all, Kawakubo applied the same ideas to … denim.
Comme des Garçons jeans! Who would have thought?
Yet what they represent is not that different from the formal-but-not ethos that powered the Celine show: the most effective way to take your shot, in order to aim those arrows real high.
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