At Paris Couture Week, designers are split into two camps.
While some re-center haute couture as the highest form of personal luxury, with a focus on its hidden sensory pleasures, others are delivering on high fashion’s promise as the ultimate escape from reality, with a combination of technical virtuosity and theatrical showmanship.
With his spring collection for the house of Valentino, staged mere days after Valentino Garavani’s funeral in Rome, Alessandro Michele somehow managed to do both.
Michele’s show was well advanced when Garavani passed away this month at the age of 93, but it was so close in spirit to the label’s founder, he couldn’t have planned a better tribute.
His darkened set was dotted with circular wooden structures with eye-level peepholes, inspired by the 19th-century ancestor of cinema, the Kaiserpanorama. The show unfolded not on a runway, but inside these brightly lit boxes, with live models instead of stereoscopic moving images.
A recording of Garavani, describing how his vocation was born in the cinema, played at the start of the show. The Italian couturier grew up admiring 1940s screen stars like Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner.
Michele’s show harked back even further, to the origins of modern-day celebrity culture, with a blend of silent film iconography and Art Deco glamour.
There was something undeniably meta about sitting in a darkened room with guests including Kirsten Dunst and Dakota Johnson, scrutinizing his homage to the Hollywood dream factory — some of the spectacular gowns no doubt bound for the Oscars red carpet.
In his Specula Mundi, Latin for “mirror of the world,” each garment carried a promise of transcendence.
Several looks were like Erté illustrations come to life, like the white satin bias-cut slip, topped with an ivory velvet embroidered coat with a pooling train, that erupted into an ostrich feather and rhinestone headdress.
Others looked like they were plucked from the costume department of the “Ziegfeld Follies” or “Mata Hari.” You could picture Gloria Swanson posing in a white chiffon cape dusted with silver geometric motifs, or a Poiret-style black velvet drop-waisted kimono coat with graphic floral decorations.
To a blend of classical music and thumping techno, models with gold crowns in sunburst pleats offered themselves up for contemplation, like objects of secular worship. Gold lamé goddess gowns added a dash of ‘80s gloss, morphing film idols with Oscar statuettes.
“I’ve always felt like an archeologist,” Michele said in a preview, adding that he was fascinated with the myth-making power of clothes. “We are human beings. I think that we need to dream, we need to look at things that don’t exist. It’s important, especially now.”
He noted how many designers who stepped into new creative director roles last year unveiled their first designs not on the runway, but on the red carpet.
“The red carpet is like a metaphysical place that is not the market, where you can put your fantasy — so nobody can say anything, because it’s not real. It’s like the Yellow Brick Road in the ‘Wizard of Oz.’ It’s like a fairy tale,” he remarked.
The presentation format forced the gaze to linger. Face pressed to the porthole, you fought between the urge to drink in each detail, or to capture the fantasy apparitions with your smartphone. As awards season plays out against chaotic world events, Michele dared his audience to dream.
