GAME OF THRONES: THE FASHION EDITION

Alber Elbaz by Irving Penn

What is Lanvin be without Alber Elbaz? The designer’s peremptory and abrupt, and now acrimonious exit from Lanvin last November capped a year of dramatic changes in the world of fashion. 

Designer musical chairs are hardly new in fashion; But 2015’s edition seemed evidence of a trend of dumbing down to the masses, a trend that will shape the way we look at fashion for many years to come. Not all the new queens on fashion’s thrones sit comfortably. You can see that in Alexander Wang’s lacklustre three-year stint at Balenciaga – you can see everyone's palpable relief at not having to witness the products of Wang's struggles. One "cool downtown party" collection is enough and ought to be contained in downtown New Yuck, where it belongs. That sort of thing hardly sits comfortably at the Paris Collections, and can hardly be expected to replace Nicolas Ghesquière's work at Balenciaga. 

Ghesquière had spent 15 years reviving the nearly century-old Balenciaga before he moved on to Louis Vuitton to replace Marc Jacobs. His experiments here are also strangely both over-thought and underwhelming. 

Now there are two more mediacore collections to add to the general ugliness of what's out there.

Lanvin Pre Fall designed by Chemena Kamali and Lucio Finale

In 2015, the world woke up to the Gucci drama of an accessories designer, Alessandro Michele, replacing Frida Gianini as creative director. While many of Gianini’s collections during her seven year tenure at the helm of the label left critics scratching their heads and searching for polite euphemisms, although of course, when she succeeded the iconic Tom Ford (who truly revolutionised fashion for the Noughties), she was lauded with enough corporate praise to sink all criticism. Gianini was hailed as a second coming of sorts and beatified as a fashion saint, becoming thinner, blonder and altered beyond recognition towards the end of her reign. Now Michele is being thusly lauded too, for basically doing some pretty things, and some pretty commercial things, which in the end simply looks like a luxed up version of the hipster trend for all things vintage, a trend already a few years old, with a Wes Anderson aesthetic. It's a sort of Gucci version of the Hedi Slimane's Saint Laurent 'strategy' - give them what they already want - just better made, and priced to appropriately. Note: Lanvin's first collection (Pre Fall 2016) not by Elbaz looks like Michele's Gucci doesn't it? 

And all that is par for the course - after all it's ready-to-wear - but what of a storied couture house like Dior? After Raf Simons stepped down last November, no successor has been announced till today, even though Spring Couture shows are looming. Hopefully they are taking their time to field a visionary creator, and not some gloriefied handbag designer-with-a-proven-sales-record to dumb down fashion even further. 

Hopefully they will appoint Elbaz - he surely fits the bill.      
    

Flashback: Look Back At Men's Fashion In 2015 (Part 4)

WORLD WORE ‘15
Look back in wonder at the year in men’s fashion trends and themes in this flashback. By Daniel Goh

Givenchy look embodies the new untraditonal suit

Dandy No More

Tailoring has finally gone over the pedantic Mad Men phase when everyone who wore a qiuff wanted a suit with all its period trimming (pocket square anyone?); entire streets crawled with what looked like heavily-sweating, badly-dressed extras in some poorly-researched period drama. We are glad to see the “sartorial” period RIP. Men’s tailoring has gone more innovative with surprising new twists to the suitings genre, with classics kicked up, mould broken, taken-apart, reconsidered, re-decorated into an entirely new beast.

Riches are piled on riches in a wealth of technique (intarsia, slashes), a riot of prints (lace, glitter) and ideas.

(FALL/WINTER: Burberry FW 17 18 19 24; Dolce FW 21 27; Comme FW 30 31 32 33; Dries FW 16; McQueen FW 7 8 9; Dior FW 37)

Raf Simons mashup of office and kindergarten

Everyone Needs a Hobo

The defining style of this era is the miss-match and contrast of genres, a post-modern mashup we had a first inkling of when street went luxe (the embellished sweatshirt is a key example, or the hybrid brogue/trainer, or pin-striped jogging pants). The more extreme the mashup the better: Think academic tweedy mashed up with slouchy denims, or grandpa mashed-up with jock, to become the new royalty of the coolly rumpled.

(FALL/WINTER: BV FW 35 15 2; Comme FW 3 4 8 16; Dunhill 4 24)

Dries Van Noten's East/West mix

The New Silk Road

The New Silk Road isn’t just China’s infrastructure investment (USD 200 billion) in trade and diplomacy projects across the globe through Iran, Pakistan, Russia and Asia – and neither is it a new hotpot restaurant. Fashion has simply opened up its notions of beauty to embrace Asian forms and decorations – and not in a simplistic or shallow way. Traditional East Asian shapes, colours that pack heat, ethnic minority embellishments and a certain unbuttoned, wrapped over volume is proposed in modern, surprisingly elegant new ways of dress, a (literally) seamless hybrid of East and West.

(FALL/WINTER: Burberry FW 10 11 12 13 15; Comme FW 6; Dries FW 14 8 18 27 28 40 30 35; Etro FW 2 6 9 40; Givenchy FW 25 26 27 36 41 48 55)

Punk Grunge Love

Gucci grunge

And just when you thought everything was going swimmingly rich and fatly irrelevant in this world of constant chaos and natural disasters, a spike of aggression and anger is both expression of and antidote against the tough new world in which we live. Think seedy and rough leathers, vests and a violent attitude.

(FALL/WINTER: Gucci FW 2 6 13 31; Etro FW 14; Givenchy FW 5 35 37) 

Part 4 of 4 - End

Flashback: Look Back At Men's Fashion In 2015

WORLD WORE ‘15

Look back in wonder at the year in men’s fashion trends and themes in this flashback. By Daniel Goh

This has been a big, dramatic year in fashion; Not only did men’s fashion thrust forward decisively in looks that completely broke from the past, it zoomed ahead without nostalgia or sentimentality for eras past, and menswear is finally freed to move into the 21 Century. 

Doherty, whom no fashion can now save, looking very much like Stephen Fry.

If Only Pete Doherty Was Slim

There was a sense of déjà vu when Pete Doherty, now a pudgy uncle at 36, appeared at Saint Laurent’s show in Paris last October. The former rake thin Rimbaud of rock (and former squeeze of Kate Moss), who was the “thin-spiration” behind Saint Laurent’s seminal Spring 2015 collection, appeared to be twice the size (and age!) of his former self (albeit still sweaty, unwashed and clutching a pack of cigarettes like a ball of used tissue). Nonetheless, the skinnier than thou models, squashed into frayed jeans and stovepipe leather leggings, a flail of beaded chiffon or a shrug of shrunken jacket recalled the poet/punk of The Libertines in his fey days. If only he were thin again.

In this hit collection for Saint Laurent, Hedi Slimane seemed also to be citing his own gloriously slim self, and by the way celebrating the marginalized, the freak, the fragile, the queen, the poet, making a case of relevance for the disagreeable, disgruntled, and preternaturally sour. That such a stance actually strikes at the heart of, and is a comment on, the happy, shiny hordes of Instagram, the hordes that have clicked their approval in waves of “Likes”, seems to be lost on the Social Media generation. This can only prove that the Social Media generation is dumb and lost and that Slimane is beyond cynical.

(Spring/Summer 2015 examples: Saint Laurent SS 1 8 16 17 38 46 53 61 65; Lanvin SS 8 10 14 23 38 43)

Part 1 of 4 - Part 2 will be posted up later

SLUT!

Let's all pray (to the fashion gods) that this controversy never dies down!

Of Saint Laurent Paris

“Hedi Slimane did a remarkable job. I liked last Monday’s fashion show very much: the Saint Laurent collection exceeded my expectations. The house needed both a renovation and a return to its roots and, with Hedi, we have started down that road. I totally stand by the house of Yves Saint Laurent and the decisions made by its teams or its artistic director, and I didn’t appreciate that some people tried to use me by linking my name to chatter about invitations or the seating of this or that person,” - Francois-Henri Pinault, chairman and chief executive officer of PPR, parent of Yves Saint Laurent

One of the purportedly stolen Yves Saint Laurent erotic drawings

In further Saint Laurent related news, WWD reports that Saint Laurent's business partner and long-time lover Pierre Bergé, who seems unwilling to let the late couturier lie in peace, is alleging that a portfolio full of personal items (including a journal, a portrait of his mother he did as a teenager and several "erotic drawings") was stolen from the Saint Laurent apartment several years ago. They are now in the possession of an anonymous German businessman who claims to have received it from one of Saint Laurent's former lovers, Fabrice Thomas, his chauffeur of that time.