PARIS — Amazons. Funny that Dior and Saint Laurent, French fashion institutions which are umbilically connected, should find themselves exploring the same notion within hours of each other on the first major day of Fashion Week in Paris. And in such different ways. Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent used tropes of masculine dressing to expand his women’s forcefields. Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri refracted ancient female myths and legends through contemporary sportswear.
She launched her show with one of the most striking gambits in recent memory. SAGG Napoli, a performance artist whose medium is archery, appeared on the catwalk looking like a 21st century version of Diana the Huntress. Throughout the presentation, she fired off arrows (in a very controlled environment, but stimulating nonetheless). Align your body with your mind to hit the target: SAGG’s message felt particularly relevant for a fashion industry that’s rather wandered off of late.
And here, it was Chiuri who was doing more wandering. As usual, before the show, she seemed bent on an interesting course, looking at the way that the classical idea of Amazons, women who defied the roles expected of them, can translate into a contemporary fashion collection from a corporate giant like Dior. Her research certainly yielded a rich tapestry of inspiration, from a 1951 Dior dress named Amazone (an asymmetrical “afternoon dress” in black wool that was tailored after a woman riding sidesaddle, or “comme une Amazone,” as the French apparently call it) to Wonder Woman, pop culture’s original Amazon. The concept of Amazonian asymmetry applied to all the looks that bared one shoulder (mythically, that made it easier to use a bow and arrow). Dior Sport, launched 75 years ago astonishingly enough, was in there somewhere with its skiwear influences and technical fabrics. So was the graphic op black/white quality of Dior sportswear in the early 70s.
Dior was deeply ingrained in the recent triumph of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics so it made sense that body-conscious athleticism was a driving force here. The knee-length gladiator trainers were a smart distillation of the Olympic spirit. Boy racer stripes and checkerboard patterns were similarly animating motifs. But, when Chiuri eventually scaled her own Olympus at show’s end with a trio of chiffon goddess dresses, I felt she’d lost the plot. Still, how would I know? My grip on reality had loosened way before.
Still, Olympus isn’t a bad place to pitch your tent, especially with your own archer firing arrows off into the void on your behalf. Anthony Vaccarello’s shows for Saint Laurent have always banked on a similar, spectacularly scheduled sense of place. We would usually be sitting in a venue with a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower and, right on cue, it would burst into its nightly light show. On Tuesday night, it was easy to imagine that something similar had been planned. The audience sat in a huge penumbral space under a giant oculus lined in gold. Above, the night sky, below, a deep navy blue floor. On past experience, you might have expected a single precisely timed shaft of moonlight to come shooting out of the heavens, illuminating the gilded oculus, giving the floor a spectral glow. But no. It rained instead, heavily. So it was umbrellas and puddles, rather than lunar illumination, that created the atmosphere.
That more melancholic effect suited the clothes Vaccarello showed just fine. The pearl-clutching shownotes imagined Yves Saint Laurent himself declaring, “I am the Saint Laurent Woman.” A Super Heroine! Vaccarello set out to illustrate that point by dressing his models in simulacra of the spectacular menswear he showed last March, which was very much based on Yves’ own precise, formal style, eyewear and all (with a sidebar of black rubber pieces to suggest the full range of YSL’s interests, his “attraction to danger” as those notes phrased it). Broad-shouldered, full-bodied, double-breasted suits were accessorised with capacious blousons, overcoats, even silken bathrobes, for an impactful take on androgynous power dressing. They were impressively uncompromising Wonder Women. But it was hard to shake the impression that it was less dressing, more dressing up (maybe because it was only four nights ago that Matthieu Blazy showed similarly oversized tailoring for Bottega Veneta, and he actually did call it “dressing up,” as in child’s play). What does it all mean now? Those days are so long gone. Maybe that’s why heaven was weeping. Weeping also for the full-skirted silhouettes of 1976′s Russian collection, or Jerry Hall’s opiated sprawl in the 1977 campaign for … what else? … YSL’s Opium perfume. Visions of bygone beauty that Vaccarello also managed to summon up for his latest looks.
The equivalent of the black rubber pieces from March were the edgy concatenations of metallic brocade, lace and ribbon that closed the show. Saint Laurent was a peerless colourist. Vaccarello had already hinted at that earlier on when a combination of saffron jersey and bronze chiffon made its way down the catwalk. But for the finale, he pushed out the boat with clashes of colour so sick and fabric so rich that they were enough to consolidate defiant excess as Saint Laurent’s fashion statement for the season, along with those formidable suit-clad Amazons of course. No arrows needed here.
