Under the golden dome of Les Invalides, the 17th-century monument where Napoleon is entombed, and on the penultimate day of fashion month, Balenciaga built a giant black box — the better to house a 154-foot long (47-meter) wooden dining table, polished to a high sheen.
Not because, as some guests posited, the brand’s mononymous creative director, Demna, wanted to issue some pointed social commentary on who gets a seat at the table (Answer: Nicole Kidman, Katy Perry, the WNBA player Cameron Brink, various brand pooh-bahs and various editor in chiefs). And not because Demna was hinting this was his last supper, though given the freneticism of the rumor mill currently spinning in fashion, it would not have been out of character for him to juice it a bit.
But because, he said backstage afterward, as a teenager he was endlessly drawing fashion collections and showing them to his family at the dining table, and that was “the beginning of my, I don’t know, obsession, or what I would call a marriage, to this job.” It is, he said, “probably one of the longest relationships I’ve been in.” Maybe that’s why he started the collection with a white lace bra, girdle, garter belt and stockings.
Sex, it seemed, was back on the menu. Spicy.
This wasn’t the first time a tabletop had become a runway — Dries Van Noten did it in 2004 — but it has been awhile.
It has also been an oddly neutered season. The in-your-face-with-my-flesh naked dressing prevalent not that long ago has practically disappeared from the catwalks. Maybe it’s simply a backlash to what came before or maybe it’s due to a general free-floating anxiety about the state of — well, almost everything — that has created a sort of big-brand paralysis. Or maybe it’s the widespread tiptoeing around about what sexy is and who gets to define it, but there has been more covering than uncovering when it comes to the body. Even the lingerie touches popping up in various shows are not so much provocative as polite; about a certain kind of dressing, rather than undressing.
Which is why the occasionally erotic has stood out. At Hermès, for example, where normally a studied discretion reigns, Nadège Vanhee flirted with sheer silk knit trousers and skirts that suggested everything was not nearly as beige as it looked (her work has been getting steadily more interesting as it has gotten naughtier). Victoria Beckham slashed through tailoring by slashing, literally, through the thigh of her trousers, from mid-pocket to upper knee, turning every step into a perverse little game of peekaboo; then she paired the pants with bodysuits cut so high on the hip that they cleared the waistband. Stella McCartney may have dedicated her show to the protection of avian life, but it was when she showed a simple sheer black dress hung from a darker yoke, and sent out bra tops in the shape of birds mixed in with oversize suiting that it really took flight.
The creation of desire, after all, is as much a part of what drives dressing as the lust for power, or for protection, or just for more stuff. It hasn’t been, however, a subject that Demna has grappled with much in his almost 10 years at Balenciaga. At least until now.
Now, however, he said, “fashion needs to get messed up.” Then he said the same thing, more graphically. Then he did it, messing not just with the libidinous, but raising the trompe l’oeil tease to a high art. It’s one way to heat things up.
All that dishabille, which included high-cut lace panties, jet-bead embroidery and underwire, turned out to be not lingerie at all, but rather bodysuits engineered to look like lingerie on bare flesh. Big blouson jackets — Demna’s puffer riff on the cocoon, with neoprene linings to preserve their shape — topped barely-there bottoms. A series of classic Balenciaga prim pleated-silk dresses turned to reveal big black corset lacings at the back that extended from the top of the spine to the hem, the ribbons loosed to expose slices of skin beneath, the ends dangling to the floor. They practically begged to be further undone.
Erogenous zones were the slice of skin just under the belly button, exposed in men’s jeans cut so impossibly low it was hard to figure out how they stayed on, and the upper thigh, where pair of dungarees had been cut in two to create hot pants and thigh-highs. The corset made another appearance, turned into what Demna called a “Medici collar” — a face-framing fan that rose high on black greatcoats — as did five-pocket jeans, rendered stiff as a board and set like a scarf around the neck, so the waistband cradled the head and the legs draped down like lapels. Which is to say, it put the head between a pair of legs.
Ahem.
At the end came a series of snap-on bandeau tops that exposed the entire back and had no visible means of staying on the body (and which recalled the Alaïa snap bracelet tops of last season). After it was all over, Nicole Kidman, whose movie about female desire, “Babygirl,” recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival, appeared backstage to hug Demna. She was wearing a long-sleeve black turtleneck version of the laced-up dress on the runway. “I love the corset,” she whispered in Demna’s ear.
On the show’s soundtrack, by Demna’s husband, BFRND, had been a remix of Britney Spears’ song “Gimme More.” You knew what she meant.
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