Rebecca Gonsalves and Alexander Fury
Independent
LONDON: The catwalks were dripping in ink once again this season as the fashion world went back to black. But rather than the cliché of archly strict or severe ideas, there was something much more sensual in play.
Perhaps that’s in part thanks to the prevailing mood of gothic splendour that stalked the catwalks, but these women weren’t wilting damsels in distress waiting to be saved; they were the heroines of their own stories.
Nowhere was that more true than at Givenchy, where Riccardo Tisci’s “Victorian chola girls” came styled with slicked-down baby hair, faces full of rhinestones and a pinch of punkish attitude.
At Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton channelled the erotic allure of the boudoir into a collection that was artfully dishevelled and indiscriminately sexy, thanks to lashings of leather and lace.
While black clothes can look flat in images, especially online, designers counteracted this by creating sumptuous levels of depth: sheer panels, rich embroideries and embellishment, and liberal use of fringe – not least at Lanvin, where Alber Elbaz had the stuff positively flying.
For spring, fashion fell in love with the 1970s; where else to take us this season, logically, but the 1980s? I mean, you could try tackling the job of making clothes for women in the here and now, but that’s boring – at least, boring next to the ruched leather boots and skirts Jonathan Anderson offered for his label and for Loewe, or the lashings of lurex and boulder-shoulder coats zig-zagged with Alexis Carrington-style graphics at Christopher Kane. By the time Marques’Almeida offered its puffy brocade redux of the coquettish couture of Eighties darling Christian Lacroix, you knew a full-blown revival was on the cards.
It’s tricky, this stuff, mostly because designers have decided that, rather than sticking to the good-taste looks that have stood the test of time (Armani’s sleek, understated tailoring, and the game-changing bodycon pioneered by Azzedine Alaia), it’s the dodgier, Dynasty-esque depths of the decade that are ripe to mine. It is, truth be told, a tough sell; at least to those old enough to remember these kinds of mistakes the first time round.
A return to the softer side is always welcome at this time of year as the cosiness of cocooning clothes becomes appealing once again. The oversize aesthetic of winter returned, but was made new with undone elements that revealed the body that lies beneath. There was a sense of sensuality to this scruffiness at Céline, not only for the flashes of flesh afforded by artfully placed holes and tears, but the “reach out and touch me” siren call of textured textiles dense with ribbon, embroidery and feathers.
Texture was top of the agenda at Joseph, too, where fuzzy woollen blankets trimmed with silk were wrapped and strapped around the body in a proposition that was at once simple and devilishly covetable. There were also loose-textured ribbed knits that looked like they’d been snagged on the knitting machine here and there, and washed and wrung out to achieve an artful impression of insouciance. Vivienne Westwood’s take on scruffy, tufty textures came slightly out of the left field (of course) with oatmeal and yellow knits piled on top of grass skirts, evening dresses and woollen suiting to create a vision that was as convincingly anarchic as it was post-apocalyptic.
Alessandro Michele, the new creative director shaking up the multibillion-pound luxury label Gucci, said he “decided to go back to the street”. He was talking about his resort show for 2016 – but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It also applies to the rest of his work for the label. But what street is Michele talking about? Archer Avenue, maybe, where Royal Tenenbaum bought a house for his family, including a mink-coated Margot, whose dour doppelgängers trudged the catwalk of the designer’s debut Gucci show?
Wes Anderson was the auteur who directed that Tenenbaum flick, of course, and his latest movie was The Grand Budapest Hotel, which inspired Emilia Wickstead’s winter collection. In fact, his most recent project was kitting out Bar Luce, the café that looks like a film set (of a café) in Prada’s fashionable Fondazione in Milan. She was another designer who looked Wes-ward for autumn/winter, with her pin-neat debutantes in fondant-fancy colours. The Wes wardrobe consists of kooky, ooky, old-lady-style stuff such as geometrically patterned lurex or odd-ball, off-coloured tweeds, and arcane accessories such as gloves, goggly specs, bobble hats and giant paste gems.
In the hand of most designers, pleating is something quite pedestrian; a way of adding volume or a laid-back swish and swing to a skirt. But leave it to Junya Watanabe, a designer who has been on a winning streak for the last few seasons, to push those ideas to the extreme with his meditation on all things folded. Watanabe’s use of origami folds, concertina pleats and honey-comb hives sculpted out of wool and leather pushed the boundaries between art and fashion once again, and helped create a standout collection.
This ’70s swagger is sustained in suede and leather versions – the latter is butter-soft and caramel-hued at Gucci – and Isabel Marant’s stock-in-trade bohemia was this season replete with flippy, kicky pleated miniskirts. While at Balmain, Olivier Rousteing evoked the glitz and glamour of the ’80s with his jewel-toned, shot-with-sparkles creations. Pleated canary-yellow palazzo pants might be an extreme version of the look, but it certainly introduces a new proposition of party wear for the festive season.
Call her Caroline, that is, the archetypal Sloane Ranger as nailed by Ann Barr and Peter York back in 1982, who is riding high for the autumn/winter 2015 season. Sloaniness is, of course, about far more than what you wear. But this season, plebs can buy into the look, into the chunky tweeds and valance frills of Miu Miu, or all that unflattering quilting, ruffling and pearl-studding at Karl Lagerfeld’s latest Chanel show, set in a French brasserie that resembled the restaurant Colbert, on Sloane Square.
You could see Alessandro Michele’s Gucci as a further riff on the Sloane; reviving the much-loved Gucci snaffle-loafer. And Emilia Wickstead – dressmaker of choice to the Sloane set – is doing a roaring trade. You can see why Sloanes born and thoroughbred would leap at these looks, but what’s the appeal to the rest of us of this fusty, fuddy-duddy stuff, stuff York himself dubbed “middle-aged fashion for young people”? Probably the light years of distance, aesthetically, between Sloane Chelsea and Made In Chelsea.