Avant-garde gardens, singular debuts and vampire brides: A dispatch from Paris Haute Couture Week

By Fiona Sinclair Scott, CNN

Paris (CNN) — My official business in Paris this week was to attend the haute couture shows, but throughout my time in the French capital I kept bumping into art. This is unsurprising in a city where you can’t walk more than a few yards before being drawn into a gallery or museum, but art was also woven into many of the collections. Fashion and the art world have long been bedfellows, and haute couture in particular is as close to art as fashion gets, but there’s something else going on. My take: In a challenging economy, the luxury world is hustling to connect with its customers, and art and culture are tried and true conversation starters.

Even at Chanel — a brand that, with the creative steer of Matthieu Blazy, is having absolutely zero problems selling things — a live artist by the name of Joël Blanc was stationed front row to paint the show. Blazy’s collection centered on the idea of fairytales – the large twisting vines in the Grand Palais, recalling “Jack and the Beanstalk,” set the scene for whimsical storytelling through perfectly made clothes, with magic beans (and the occasional golden egg!) scattered throughout. See: delight-inducing shoes, a little row of ugly duckling to swan buttons, and a black revenge dress with wings that chased down the bridal gown.

Jonathan Anderson is a well-known lover, collector and curator of art, and within Dior he joins a long lineage of designers who had a similar partiality. Christian Dior himself was a gallery owner before he became a couturier and many of the creative directors of the house have been inspired by the artists of their time. For Anderson’s sophomore couture collection, presented within the Musée Rodin, he turned to the work of a more modern sculptor: Lynda Benglis. The 84-year-old American makes unruly mixed media sculptures that have challenged the traditional art establishment (conventionalists found her use of latex and glitter most unsettling). Benglis has worked all over the world, but it was her connection to Santa Fe, New Mexico and Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, India that Anderson became most enraptured with, and the colors and textures of these two very different landscapes appear throughout the collection.

While sitting in the grounds of the Musée Rodin, I could not help but think that it would have made a beautiful wedding venue for a certain very famous pop star and her sporty beau who, inexplicably, chose to celebrate their love in a filthy midtown stadium. Imagine instead, vows in front of Rodin’s “The Kiss,” cocktails within the beautiful 18th century former Hôtel Biron. But, alas, Anderson was only in charge of the dress.

While there were no literal art references at Balenciaga, Pierpaolo Piccioli’s first couture collection for the house was so artful. On top of being a master of the craft itself, the Italian is an emotional designer — so much of what he does is about generating a feeling, like joy, or one similar to that little choke you might experience from a song, or a film or a piece of art. “Couture isn’t only about the dress,” he told a small group of press backstage. “It’s about the mindset.”

Outside of the shows, I nipped into the Azzedine Alaïa Foundation, a place of pilgrimage for many fashion enthusiasts, and for good reason – it’s an emporium of archival fashion, books and art. It also features Alaïa’s studio, now entombed behind a circular glass window, completely untouched since his death, thanks in many ways to Carla Sozzani, a fashion fairy godmother of sorts, and the friend Alaïa left in charge of his legacy and archive. At the end of my visit, I asked Sozzani to describe Alaïa’s legacy and she quickly replied, “integrity,” something hard-fought in the business of fashion.

On the subject of integrity, Michael Stewart’s Paris Couture debut created a little fizz in the fashion world. The Irish designer’s label Standing Ground has been gaining momentum, thanks to a growing word-of-mouth private client roster who come to him for his modern take on eveningwear. Stewart, so far, appears to be dancing to the beat of his own drum – proposing new ideas and gently resisting some of the conventions of the fashion system. His collection was a reminder that fashion feels like art when you see designers develop and perfect techniques that support a razor-sharp point of view — rising above the horrid churn of the industry. Speaking to a small group of us backstage, he said, “We shouldn’t feel pressure as designers to abandon everything and come up with something new every season.” He also talked about an “off kilter” idea of beauty, not beauty for beauty’s sake but something with a little… something. In the show, freaky looking models with eerie stares (thanks to contact lenses) in kinky beaded skirts and impossibly cinched waists looked as though they might be siring into vampires and turning on their wealthy but witless husbands. So good!

Rahul Mishra, who become the first Indian designer to show on the Paris couture calendar in 2020, cited a famous Michelangelo line from history in his show notes: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free,” before reminding us that same philosophy can be seen centuries earlier in the Indian subcontinent, where ancient artisans transformed stone into eternal muses, divine lovers and gods – filling temples with sculptural work (which the Europeans would do their best to plunder later on). Mishra’s collection looked ancient and talismanic, the clothes often towering high above models’ shoulders. “The standards of couture are exacting, but Indian craftsmanship has met, and in many cases exceeded, these benchmarks for centuries,” Isha Ambani, who had been sitting front row, told me afterwards.

I asked Ambani about Manish Malhotra, who made his debut on the schedule this season (her company has stakes in both brands and he was the creative director of her brother’s superwedding last year). The designer draws from another artform: cinema (he started his creative career in costume design for Bollywood blockbusters). “Manish has played a defining role in shaping contemporary Indian glamour,” Ambani said. while pointing to the “cinematic sensibility,” he brings to fashion. The art in Malhotra’s work is evident in the craft, but it is also evident in his ability to tell a story. The night before the show he told me he was less interested in presenting an Indian’s take on couture, but rather wanted to tell his story, which begins with his mother. “On this global platform, of course I’m going to introduce my work, but I also wanted to introduce myself,” he said. The collection, sweetly titled “Maa,” is told in four chapters, and is an ode to the woman who gave him life. The first look includes a row of 3D-printed busts of mother and child through time.

The Opera Gallery, a space that was once Versace’s flagship boutique in Paris, is currently hosting a show of fashion obsessed Brazilian painter Gustavo Nazareno. Speaking by phone from Sao Paolo, Nazareno told me he would escape to the library as a child to read about Renaissance art. Later, he discovered Irving Penn “and that changed my life.” “I would spend days looking at photos. I trained with my eyes,” he said. That independent study paid off: His pictures of Afro-Brazilian deities draped in fabrics in a distinctly couture-like manner, posing as if models in 1980s-era Vogue Italia, are so rich and seductive (so seductive, in fact, that most of the paintings in the show have already sold).

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