Eric Wilson is InStyle’s Fashion News Director. Sit front row at Fashion Week with him by following him on Twitter (@EricWilsonSays) and Instagram.
At this Paris Fashion Week, more than any in recent memory, there are constant reminders that they don’t make designers like they used to. They don’t make them like the provocateur Jean Paul Gaultier, who, after nearly 40 years on the runway, presented his final ready-to-wear collection on Saturday night (pictured, above). They don’t make them like the brilliant Yohji Yamamoto, who after making almost genderless robes and monastic dresses since 1981, delivered an ode to sex that included bare midriffs and bikini tops.
And they don’t make them like the groundbreaking Gaby Aghion, the founder of Chloé, a trailblazer who set Paris on its modern course of ultra-chic ready-to-wear in the 1950s, who died on Saturday at the age of 93.I only met Aghion, pictured below, once, at the opening of an exhibition on the house’s 60th anniversary two years ago, and though I had been warned her English was limited, and her health fading, she managed to convey a message to me in a brief conversation that I can only describe as flirtatious. She had a wicked sense of humor, and a fearless spirit. “She’s funny,” Karl Lagerfeld told me after she whispered something that looked rather naughty in his ear.
Despite her background as a wealthy immigrant from Egypt with social connections, she eschewed the notion that a Parisian woman should not work, and found couture of post-war France to be outdated and uncomfortable, so she set to designing clothes with both a sense of practicality and whimsy. Because her family did not approve of her career, she named her collection Chloé, after a friend, because she thought the name to be oh-so-French, and sort of an inside joke.
“I lived the life I wanted,” Aghion once said, a comment that has come to represent the spirit of the house and all those designers who have followed in her footsteps, including Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo and, since 2011, Clare Waight Keller.
Keller, more than her recent predecessors, has demonstrated a carefully studied appreciation of that legacy. Her codes are precise and demonstrate there can still be a balance between playful and provocative, or between girlie and tomboy.Chloé is a house that shines in the spring, especially, and Waight Keller’s collection on Sunday, which was dedicated to Aghion, expressed those ideas in lovely laces, sporty suede, soft denim skirts, and dresses that appeared inspired by parachutes, halters in soft colors or an acid yellow that hung loose in the back, with drapes of fabric supported by a single strand. It felt like the right collection by which to remember Aghion.
Pictured, from L-R: Runway looks from Yohji Yamamoto and Chloé.
An enormous contingent of designers of all ages turned out for Gaultier’s final ready-to-wear show held the night before inside the leather-seated Grand Rex theater, the largest cinema in Europe. Alexander Wang, Jeremy Scott, Rick Owens, Aber Elbaz and Pierre Cardin (at 92) all pushed their way through the throngs of immobile gawkers, marking an occasion that felt like the passing of an era, even though Gaultier will continue his design career during the couture shows.
Indeed, his ready-to-wear events have been so memorable that it is hard to imagine Fashion Week without them, from the hilarious (topless Madonna) to the offensive (his “rabbi chic” collection of 1993 was scandalous) to the commendably brave, having cast a wide range of ages and body types that embraced a more democratic notion of beauty.
But at least Gaultier wasn’t going out with tears. His show was designed as a beauty-queen pageant, with contests for Miss Tour de France (featuring athletic jackets and biker shorts printed with a logo that said “Loco Logo,” pictured, below left), Miss Rédactrice de Mode (models dressed as famous fashion editors like Carine Roitfeld and Suzy Menkes) and Miss Vintage (older women with younger, shirtless men). It went from camp, with Rossy de Palma stripping off a chic black skirt suit to walk the runway in a sheer black corset, to classy, with an elegant series of classic pinstripes and tuxedos, and back to campy again with some footballer-wives-inspired fashion. There was also a typical Gaultier non sequitur, in this case a series of gowns and suits inspired by masked wrestlers, or in the designer’s parlance, contestants in the pageant of Miss Lucha Libre.
And Phoebe Philo captured the spirit of Kate Bush in her standout Céline collection on Sunday (pictured, above right), with “This Woman’s Work” on the soundtrack, a knit dress that ended in a ball of swishing fringe, wide-legged pants that bordered on flares, a small selection of floral dresses and then superbly severe uniform jackets, either black or extreme navy, that closed with buttons that looked like delicate padlocks. Perhaps Philo caught Bush’s recent concerts in London. Interspersed in this collection were small surrealist touches, little white pendants or accents in the shape of a single hand, a pair of lips, or a snake.
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