Designers widen repertoire – ‘Incomplete’ looks

This news has been read 5557 times!

Lemaire
Lemaire

PARIS, June 23, (AP): The world’s fashion watchers cried “Bonjour Paris” Wednesday as they bid good-bye to Milan and headed to the City of Light for the last installment of menswear shows for spring-summer 2017.

Here are some highlights:

Valentino

Twenty-four-year-old Chinese superstar actor Yang Yang hit the front row for Valentino, alongside “American Psycho” musical star Benjamin Walker.

The American actor rocked a check Valentino suit that hit a dapper note that was very much in keeping with the collection’s opulent venue – the 19th century mansion Hotel Salomon de Rothschild.

The show was all about the “unfinished.”

Faded denim shirts and jackets with a cowboy air had pockets ripped off to produce contrasting color segments; and random-looking intarsias on coffee cup brown coats – and on oversize outerwear – had a nice deconstructed quality to them.

Mottled camouflage prints on a slim fitting sweater had a blurry incomplete feel.

Military and camouflage prints have quickly become a menswear signature for Valentino’s designers Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, who have only been doing men’s fashion for a few years.

While many of these looks made the “incomplete” statement in a creative way – with random badges and accessorizing motifs – the styles benefited when the designers widened their repertoire: Like a standout black coat with studs sprinkled, almost haphazardly, on the collar.

Louis Vuitton

The age of email and rising ecological awareness doesn’t seem to have left a mark on the fashion industry’s antiquated system of invitations.

Season after season, gasoline-guzzling couriers crisscross Paris to deliver personally to fashion insiders the ever-elaborate, often hand-made, show invites.

Top houses vie for the wackiest or most imaginative idea.

Louis Vuitton and Dior Homme employ trusted calligraphers who immortalize the names of each guest in baroque ink swirls – works of art that usually end up thrown on the runway floor immediately after the presentation.

This season, an invite for a jewelry house show, Surplus Sound System, was a 7-inch black vinyl record, with the show details on the B-side. It drove home the point that old school is the style of choice for Paris fashion.

The invitation to Dries Van Noten’s show was a heavy tablet of pottery with the information stamped on.

Lemaire

The trend for the outdoors and the utilitarian has been seen in myriad Milan spring shows – such as in Prada’s backpacks, Moncler’s multi-pocketed clothes and Gucci’s rainwear.

It also infused Christophe Lemaire’s designs for his eponymous Paris-based menswear house.

And the City of Light, which has seen historic flooding and torrential downpours burst the banks of the Seine River in recent weeks, is one city that could do with a summer raincoat.

A hardy long golden brown, with zippers, flapping lapels and a large asymmetrical pocket opened the Wednesday collection – setting the out-in-the-elements theme. This was carried on in trekking sandals.

A long Arabic tunic mixed contrasted nicely with tailored menswear pants, a moss green loose, jazzy 80s shirt and factory-worker styles.

But the touch of panache by the former Hermes designer was see in the color palette – brightly colored coats and overalls- in ochre, saddle brown, Siberian snowflake, deep black and Prussian blue.

This news has been read 5557 times!

Related Articles

Back to top button

Advt Blocker Detected

Kindly disable the Ad blocker

Verified by MonsterInsights