Fascinated by well-born people, fashion reserves special attention to the nobility and the aristocracy. But if the men’s fashion week in Paris, from June 21 to 26, was inspired by various forms of nomenklatura… it’s to better abuse them.
The scholar Louis-Gabriel Nouchi, who each season translates a literary classic into sensual plays, finds fertile ground in Dangerous relationships (1782) by Choderlos de Laclos, carefree epistolary licentiousness that ends in shame, smallpox and death. “I wondered what the Viscount of Valmont would look like today”, explains the 30-year-old. In Nouchi’s imagination, Valmont has kept, to give himself respectability, his ponytail or a knot around the collar of his shirt. But to see him represented by fellows with hairy torsos who walk around in openwork briefs on the hip, in torn tank tops, even assuming the garter or in the simplest device under the dressing gown, we feel that Mr. buttocks… “It was necessary, emphasizes the creator, achieve a mix between the sensitive and the brutal. »
A silver spoon on the ear
Walter Van Beirendonck and Rei Kawakubo, two of fashion’s brightest minds, are enjoying court games this season. Entertaining at the Théâtre de la Madeleine, the Belgian bathes his colorful and joyful universe, of which David Bowie remains a key inspiration, with a royal touch, straight from the great Bourbon era: golden outfits, collarette, sun pendant, shoes with heels, frills or trousers tightened by side knots… For Comme des Garçons, the Japanese woman takes the opposite view, nourished by “Court Jesters in the Middle Ages”with their “right to free expression” to sovereigns. A form of“punk spirit”, she judges. On the catwalk, this takes the form of costumes puffed up with crinolines of sorts, baggy pants with commedia dell’arte prints or four-sleeved jackets. Everything is accessorized with animal head masks and gel-fixed hairstyles that graze the ceiling!
We get closer to the world of a lord in Hed Mayner. You would think that a kid player was locked up for a whole night in a mansion and came out the next day having appropriated the treasures. The English embroidery household linen, acquired in Parisian flea markets or Tel-Aviv flea markets by the Israeli designer, forms tunics that reveal the lower back; hunting boots are worn with oversized sand jackets; the small silver spoons stuck in the dresser become earrings. Poetic and distinguished.
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