Thom Browne makes his couture debut, while Schiaparelli, Dior and Iris Van Herpen spin their own dreamy tales.
In 1955 the idea of the gray flannel suit as the symbol of the soul-deadened corporate drone entered the American lexicon thanks to Sloan Wilson’s novel, making it pretty much impossible to look at that particular item of clothing in a neutral way ever again. It became the stand-in for our skewed work-life balance, the triumph of business over imagination. It got, it’s fair to say, a bad rep. Mommy And Me Matching Outfits
For the last two decades the New York designer Thom Browne has been trying to change all that: first, by shrinking the proportions of his men’s suits to demand a reassessment; next, by erasing gender boundaries, and then by creating so many variations on the theme, he effectively transformed the little gray suit into a Rorschach test that contained multitudes.
On Monday in Paris, however, he took it to a new level: the couture. Effectively proposing that the gray suit deserved the same mythic status as the Chanel bouclé suit or the YSL Smoking or the Dior Bar. And that American fashion (not fashion by an American, but fashion with its roots overtly in American culture) deserves its place on the couture stage.
It was a pretty radical proposition.
The shows began in Paris in the shadow of national unrest over the police killing of a teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent that has sparked charges of racism and discrimination. For awhile, there was a question about whether the collections would — or should — happen at all. There are few events, after all, as symbolically tied to the country’s history of privilege and insularity than couture: made by hand, to order, styles for the .001 Percent. Hedi Slimane canceled his Celine men’s wear show, originally scheduled for the night before the couture officially was to begin. Bulgari canceled a cocktail party.
The rest stood fast, monitoring the situation and noting, when asked, that there were few industries as representative, globally, of France’s economic and artistic strength as fashion. And that the couture is a celebration of that craft at the highest level. But it was jarring to walk past protests in front of one set of historic buildings (the Assemblée Nationale, the Palais de Justice) on the way to see extraordinarily elaborate frocks in another (the Petit Palais, the Musée Rodin).
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