For the fashion industry, one of the main lures of Paris — aside from the shopping opportunities, rich food and deep-pocketed advertisers — is the design community’s ability to surprise its audience. The potential to instill a certain degree of anticipation and wide-eyed wonder in seen-it-all editors and retailers is one way this French city has maintained its reputation. The fashion industry believes in Paris’ power to foretell the future.
What it has hinted at so far, however, has been unnerving for those who know that it takes a unique skill to be a designer. Baffling news began in summer with the installation of actor and perennial paparazzi bait Lindsay Lohan as artistic adviser of Emanuel Ungaro. The move was wholly intended to ratchet up publicity for a house that has been rapidly fading from prominence. It also read like a brutal insult to design school graduates with talent and expertise but without an archive of photos on TMZ.
Lohan showed her collection Sunday in the Carrousel du Louvre. Oh, how very strange and disconcerting to type such a sentence: Lohan, collection, Louvre. The city that gave the world Chanel, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, now has Lindsay.
The collection was dominated by fuchsia. It included safety-orange ruched leggings, heart prints, genie pants and heart-shaped glittering pasties. It lacked finesse, sophistication, technical skill and any evidence of good taste.
HIGHLIGHT OF THE WEEK British designer Phoebe Philo garnered thunderous applause in her first runway show since taking over the reins last year at Celine. Among the collection: clean-lined sheath dresses and A-line skirts in mossy and tan leather, simple poplin shirts, creamy, romantic blouses and perfectly tailored wide-leg trousers in featherweight caramel wool.
PRETTY AS PORCELAIN Classic French fashion house Leonard gave a shout-out to its Japanese customer base on Monday with a spring-summer 2010 ready-to-wear collection inspired by 17th-century ceramics from Kyoto.
Ankle-length dresses in featherweight chiffon were printed with koi fish, flowers and artful curlicues in navy, peacock and sky blues — frequent motifs in Imari porcelain — with artful metallic finishings at the neckline. OLD-SCHOOL KNITS It was a dance party Sunday at French knitwear label Sonia Rykiel’s spring-summer show, and the girls were dressed in their disco best in little Lurex sundresses and glittery sweaters.
The 79-year-old “queen of knitwear” sent out a collection of Rykiel classics that underscored why she won that moniker. Wearing snug-fitting knit skirt suits and oversized sweaters with a pair of knit biker shorts, the models pranced, skipped and hopped across the glitter-strewn catwalk.