A breath of fresh fantasy at Paris Couture Week

By Rachel Tashjian, CNN

Paris (CNN) — “The rest of the year is for reality,” said Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of what is perhaps Paris’s most eccentric couture house, Schiaparelli, minutes after his latest collection, featuring a densely feathered jacket with foot-high soaring wings for a collar, was unveiled.

Paris Couture Week, which the American designer’s Monday morning show kicked off, is for fantasy. For play. Not for escapism, per se – Roseberry’s Schiaparelli show, one of his finest and weirdest to date, vibrated with implications about our world’s rigid definition of beauty, with horns, feathers and splashes of neon – but for indulgence.

Couture, after all, is about imagining another, more outrageous reality for yourself. What if I dressed like a pre-code movie star (Valentino)? What if I got married in a dress of degraded flower petals (Dior)? What if I had a green drop waist shirtdress in a silk mousseline lighter than a sigh, with a matching robe, embroidered with mushrooms, by Chanel? Would I write more love letters? Make more demands? Host more seances? What extravagant actions can a life of astonishing clothes inspire?

It was a packed week, with major designer debuts at Chanel and Dior when Matthieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson, showed couture collections for the first time within their new respective homes. It was also a time of legends remembered, as Armani Privé held its first show since the passing of Giorgio Armani and Valentino showed its first couture collection since the death of its founder Valentino Garavani earlier this month.

Both Blazy and Anderson, millennials with big brains, are yanking the fusty business of extraordinary clothes into the present – the former with a swell of empathy, and the other with a cerebral but intimate approach.

Blazy’s Chanel was a story of lightness that began with transparent silk mousseline pieces and flourished into dresses and suits and dresses ornamented with layers of feathers. The silk mousseline garments floated almost like ghosts or memories of Chanel designs past, including the famous skirt suit with its matching cardigan and Karl Lagerfeld modernisms like jeans with a tweed jacket, plus the iconic flap bag. A group of plain wool suits were equally as easy, especially one with almost no detail except an oval brooch at the neck and coordinating gems at the cuffs. Its simplicity was profound, and clearly the result of hours of labor and design. And what in a woman’s life today is simple, let alone light and breezy?

Jonathan Anderson knows how to seize an enormous stage – his designs, at Loewe and now at Dior, are commercially savvy but extreme, and he knows how to make his bonkers clothing pop up everywhere. Terming his collection a “Wunderkammer,” or a cabinet of curiosities, this was no bric-a-brac of details and stuff, but a combination of highly clarified silhouettes like bulbous gowns and dresses plus layers of tops and bottoms that slithered and puffed, with ornate details like jewelry in the form of bunches of cyclamen flowers, and miniature portraits-turned-brooches.

Anderson faced criticism online after his raucous menswear collection, shown during the men’s shows in Paris earlier this month, divided audiences. But the designer one-upped his haters by sending poesies of cyclamen as his show invitations, noting on Instagram that John Galliano, the hero of couture to many fashion fans, had brought the designer such a bouquet when he came to see his women’s ready-to-wear collection last fall. Galliano, who was famously fired from Dior in 2011, after making antisemitic comments in a bar in Paris, also attended the show, as well as Jean Paul Gaultier, a show of baton-passing if there ever were one. While Anderson’s clothes will undoubtedly entice a younger couture buyer, some of his silhouettes rely too much on skeleton-like structures that abstract the body, rather than working with it. He should challenge himself and his atelier, with their unparalleled skills, to get a bit more focused on the female form.

Then again, maybe that’s too much attachment to reality.

Alessandro Michele, at Valentino, was also thinking of how to collide reality and fantasy, staging his collection in nooks inspired by the kaiser panorama, an early 20th century precursor to cinema, in which viewers sat around a circle, staring into a contraption displaying slides. In a press release, Michele wrote about the gaze and Walter Benjamin – hokum that it was tough to buy – but looking at his models, all wearing ensembles that recalled the 1930s excesses of Hollywood costume, made for an afternoon of antique pleasure. Michele’s couture clothes – feathered headdresses, batwing sleeves and pleasurable touches of grotesquerie (a clashing shoe, a dated ruffle) – feel more like costume than genuine fashion (role-play rather than ideas and identities for customers to play with). But it was transportive, the way a black-and-white romance film can be. “You know, the way you can dream with concrete things,” Michele explained backstage. “I feel very lucky because I live an incredible life, seeing beautiful things, and I was trying to make everything part of this dream.”

Of course, as with all dreams, it was over once the lights went up. And it was back to the reality of the rest of the year.

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