Is it the fear of being bored by the usual ballet of successive silhouettes? Some designers, during the haute couture fashion week held from July 4 to 7, favored the sense of performance to win over their audience.
The theatricality of John Galliano was expressed for a long time in show shows when he piloted the destinies of Dior from 1996 to 2011. While, at Maison Margiela, the accent has long been placed on his technical virtuosity (patchworks, deconstructions, acrobatic cuts…), the Englishman allows himself to reconnect with this emphasis. She has never been as explosive as this season. At the Théâtre de Chaillot, in collaboration with the British troupe Imitating The Dog, Galliano creates a performance between live performance and video, where the public sees both the film being tinkered with and its result on the big screen, a format whose theater directors like Cyril Teste or Katie Mitchell have made their signature.
At Margiela, the story is that of a couple seeking help after a shooting in the middle of the Arizona desert, and whose past we discover in flashbacks. To illustrate this point, interpreted in playback by the models in a tone that pastiches American cinema, from western to romance, haute couture gives substance to phenomenal costumes. Armed thugs in sandblasted jacquards, sluts in ball gowns cut out of silk satin and latex headdresses, ole-ole cinema usher in crimson skirt, nurses whose bulging tweed coats bring together the green of the block blouses and the blood red, Pierrot with a diaphanous complexion wrapped in a suit made of salvaged sheets, smocked, beaded, feathered, torn, embellished effects… Until the end credits, we remain speechless for half an hour of frenzy.
To capture the public, the Dutch Viktor & Rolf invite themselves on the catwalk and dare the two-in-one fashion show. The first passage is a very 1980s explosive parade of models in dark glasses, in masculine suits, shirts and ties, belted cashmere coats or woolen pea coats, with shoulders so exaggeratedly marked that the garment protrudes from the body it envelops, like a parody of power dressing. Then, the designers come before the attentive public to strip a model of her clothes and the aluminum base that allows this XXXXL illusion. Keeping his jacket, they transform it directly by a system of cords: it then becomes closer to the body and gathered, as if they were discovering a new use for it. Backstage, the models return to show off this second, more relaxed interpretation of their attire, to warm applause.
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