At 8 p.m., arriving on March 7, 2016, in front of the entrance to the Saint Laurent fashion show in Paris, the guests felt that a change was afoot. The gauge, reduced, gave headaches, both to the organizers and to those who, like every season, want to be part of it. We had to trick or beg to get a place for the show, scheduled rue de l’Université, in the Hôtel de Sénecterre, a superb 17th century building.e century, where the brand is based.
Inside, the atmosphere of this fall-winter 2016 women’s ready-to-wear fashion show has little to do with the electric one of the previous one. Dedicated to the man, it was applauded in February in Los Angeles by American stars like Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber or Lenny Kravitz. At the Hotel de Sénecterre, on the contrary, Hedi Slimane, artistic director of Saint Laurent since 2012, multiplies the references to French haute couture.
click of heels
Present are Pierre Bergé, the businessman (shareholder of the The world from 2010 to his death in 2017) and companion of the couturier who died eight years earlier, but also Betty Catroux and Catherine Deneuve, blonde beauties who once inspired and wore Yves’ creations.
“The rock’n’roll of Slimane’s dazzling fashion shows, with noise, fury, grand catwalks, seemed to have evaporated in favor of a hushed and elegant intimacy”, recalls Natalie Kingham, who was then working as a buyer for the MatchesFashion site. Once the guests are seated on the black chair where their name is inscribed on a bronze plate, they are instructed to avoid photographing with their smartphones, they are warned: “It’s a silent experience. »
Hedi Slimane, who listened to David Bowie as a child and rocked his shows with songs by Junior Kimbrough, Ty Segall or La Femme, puts away the guitars. ” Sign that he hangs up the gloves? », asks the audience. For weeks, the rumor has been circulating that the negotiations to renew the contract that binds him to the Kering group are tense… Throughout the parade, we will only hear the click of the heels going down the stairs. And, as during the couture shows of Monsieur Saint Laurent between 1977 and 2002, the voice of Bénédicte de Ginestous describing the forty-two passages.
Not all criticism will be sensitive to the parade. “Who’s to believe that women want to dress up like the party ghosts of the past? “, Vanessa Friedman, of the “New York Times”
On the models, only evening wear, such as appearances à la Helmut Newton. “First I have in mind the people who wear the clothes and the way to wear them, characters, specific personalities, explained Hedi Slimane in 2007 on France Culture. Clothes are almost secondary. » This time, however, they have as much dog as the supermodels and seem to have been thought of as a demonstration of know-how.
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