It says something that here in Paris at fashion week, much of the chatter among the Americans hasn’t been about a show or a shop, but about a magazine cover.
This week, New York magazine released its first issue dedicated entirely to men’s style. The cover, shot by Ryan McGinley, is the sort of “notice me” casting you would want for a big first issue: a football team’s worth of celebs and notables, schvitzing it out at a Turkish bath house in nothing but briefs. It’s a bit “Porky’s” and a bit Playgirl, with a dash of “Challengers.”
It made me think about how starved we are for true provocation in fashion, for a shoot or a show that prods and polarizes.
The not-quite-nude images of Troye Sivan, Mike Faist, Elliot Page, Rashid Johnson and others in the New York magazine spread are steamy. But, perhaps because bare flesh is all around us in this overexposed media moment, they also read as chaste, wholesome even. Some pals bro-bonding at the baths.
Provocation is what fuels this industry — what gives it subversive charge and shifts our ideas around how we prepare ourselves for this world.
In Europe and elsewhere, brands endeavor to deliver it. Some are more deft than others.
Take Glenn Martens’s corporate-tested makeout session at Diesel in Milan last week. Great for Instagram but, in reality, as scandalous as a middle-school play. Martens was onto something, though, when he showed his near-sheer tops at Maison Margiela, where he is also the creative director. The implication of nudity — rather than nudity itself — pulls us in.
It’s a lesson that Antonin Tron needs to learn at Balmain, where he cut dresses so high they came within millimeters of full frontal. So unsexy it churned my stomach.
Another attempt at provocation: the Matières Fécales show on Monday, a sartorial William Wyler epic with an anti-elitist message. It consisted of 99 models of color, lasted more than 30 minutes and shut down the Place de la République. There were “Resist” dresses and grayscale American flags. It crescendoed as a Black model carted two white dummies in corporate suits on her shoulders. In just four shows, the designers Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran have done a remarkable job of turning their outsiders, avanty Instagram account into a real business.
But beyond the lack of punch from the clothes (my colleague Vanessa Friedman called them “frustratingly derivative”), there was something off about a brand that had dressed Demi Moore and Zendaya — and had a long list of other V.I.C.s willing to pay for its extravagant gowns — delivering such an Occupy message. (Making hundreds of guests wait more than an hour for Rihanna to arrive didn’t quite set an anti-elite tone either.)
At Dior, Jonathan Anderson appeared to give up on prodding us altogether. His first few collections for the brand were stuffed with thorniness — pirate captain hats, fold-over loopy tweed coats and inflated A-line dresses. This season was Anderson at his most tame.
The consensus was that his gossamer plaid skirts and houndstooth dresses with swooshy hems were “pretty” (an adjective rarely ascribed to his work). When you’re a brand as voracious as Dior, pretty may be the right tone to appeal to a global audience.
At Saint Laurent we saw a different kind of risk. Almost the whole collection was wrapped in gold, perhaps a final 1980s-indebted flourish from the creative director Anthony Vaccarello, who is rumored to be leaving the brand after a decade. (Vaccarello’s protracted bow only cemented the feeling that this was adieu.)
Was he awarding himself a gold star? Leaving behind a monotonous collection for the company to contend with before ducking out? It left me bored.
Frivolity and freedom
Since taking charge of Dries Van Noten, the designer Julian Klausner hasn’t had to play much catch-up. Still, this latest collection felt special. (Or as my friend Steff Yotka, the editor of i-D magazine, texted: It was all-caps amazing.)
Klausner wove a tapestry of modern mirth and midcentury maximalism: leopard skirts and blue-gray smock tops, clunky costume jewelry and rugby shirts with blown-out stripes, plunge-neck sweater vests and dresses screened with what looked like old movie posters. It felt as if he had plopped us at a corner brasserie circa 1957, then plucked only the most dauntless women to pass by.
This show ticked off all that’s missing at many fashion shows now: uplift, frivolity, freedom. Much like his predecessor, Klausner seems born with an ability to make a woman look alluring, like just the person you’d want to be sat next to at a dinner party.
Yet Klausner also appears a little more unchained than his predecessor. More willing to hit the wrong keys with his sickly greens and plastic blues, shirts scrunched at the midsection and suits airbrushed with stars that look, to paraphrase another friend, like the tattoos you would get as a teenager.
Other things worth knowing about:
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“Hey, she’s showing clothes!” That’s what I texted a friend on Monday during the Hodakova show. You can’t ever be sure with the slippery Swedish designer Ellen Hodakova Larsson. She’s served up a wearable wooden cello (OK, wearable was a stretch there), tops made of hair and skirts fashioned from rugs. Monday’s show was less Margiela-esque deconstruction and more Helmut Lang minimalism — leather suits, simple waxed cloth trenches, sailor-collared dresses. Well, until we got to the woman wearing a tube of braided rope. Old habits die hard …
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I must also point out the surrealist eye paint makeup at Hodakova, which rendered the models as if they were freakish René Magritte figures.
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I ducked into the Dries Van Noten store on Tuesday between shows, and three men were trying on this fair isle-paneled cardigan.
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Still thinking about Francis Ford Coppola’s one purple sock at Saint Laurent.
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Three brands — Marie Adam-Leenaerdt, Matières Fécales and Hodakova — used Nina Simone as a soundtrack. Golly, is her cover of “Just Like a Woman” good.
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Thanks to my colleague Jon Caramanica for recommending I visit DolceVitaHub in the Marais, where mop-haired 20-somethings buy their aughts vintage Roberto Cavalli jeans, nylon Prada bombers and slinky Dolce & Gabbana knits. In this resale boom moment, there is a store for every taste.
What we’re reading and watching:
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For The Times’s 175th birthday, we reflected on how the paper has tracked fashion trends over the decades. The final project is a really pleasing catalog of fashionable people. We could all be 10 percent happier if we looked at Bill Cunningham’s photos weekly.
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This Vogue story on the uniform adopted by the artist Taryn Simon, who has a giant exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum: an apronlike skirt and a balloon-sleeve blouse. With the outfit’s pockets, she had practicality in mind: “I never wanted to carry a bag,” she said.
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An incisive profile of the man who filled the biggest shoes in fashion: Giorgio Armani’s.
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This interview with Sofia Coppola, who’s celebrating the 20th anniversary (20! I know) of “Marie Antoinette” with a documentary put together with hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes footage shot by her mother, Eleanor.
Style Outside
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