As fashion’s great empath, Alessandro Michele feels this moment intensely. He was deep in dark thought while we talked. “I went back to look at Valentino where everything was precise and clear, and it’s not that anymore.” Ironically, there was precision in the multiple blouse-and-skirt combinations with their ’40s inflection, and his clarity is never anything other than consistent. “Touching the duchesse, it’s so incredible,” he rhapsodised. “It’s like you’re finding a meaning in your job that is so apparently disconnected from the outside. But it’s not true, because the outside is you.” I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s having an existential crisis. The world seems to have soured a little on his enchantments. Familiarity has bred, if not contempt with his consistency, then at least a kind of infuriating ennui. “I’m the one that makes the mess, but the mess is outside,” he said cryptically. “I have to find the shape. I need to clean something up. Otherwise, I’m gonna die.” You mean like a janitor, I suggested. The word was new to Michele and his righthand woman Angela. “Addetto alle pulizia,” was offered in translation. “Exactly!” they cried at once.
Michele had found a match for his mood in words written by Pier Paolo Pasolini, first as a student in 1941 (maybe that’s why the era was in his mind) and then in 1975, by which time he was a globally revered director. Young Pasolini wrote a paean to fireflies, praising them as nature’s symbol of glorious defiance in the midst of fascist darkness. By 1975, surrendering to pessimism in the face of what he saw as a new tide of conformist fascist thinking, he thought their light had been extinguished.
Michele called his show “Fireflies.” He followed his dramatic “clean up or die” declaration with another unambiguous statement: “This is the only thing I know how to do.” He shone as bright as ever with his gilded, embellished fabrics, his own fireflies undiminished. “Fleeting sparks in the dark, constellations of fireflies that unveil gateways of possibilities and nourish imagination with political force…” His finale was the most poignant moment of the week. His models gathered on the catwalk, gazing upwards as the ceiling of the venue danced with light. So hopeful, so melancholic.
If Michele is an empath, Miuccia Prada is a supreme ironist. Her fabulous Miu Miu show took me back to triumphs of seasons past when she would marshal the most wayward influences (Cookie Mueller, anyone?) to shape the most irresistible fashion statements. It was the ultimate flex. She did it again on Monday with a parade of working women, from factories, assembly lines, nurseries, care homes, the kind of salt-of-the-earth female labourers who sustain society with their selfless, usually unrecognised efforts. Inevitably, it was controversial. How could a fashion billionairess not come off as patronising by making a pitch based on the style of the “little” people, especially at a time when the social divide has never been more unbridgeable? Prada seemed to acknowledge as much after the show. “I was so afraid because it’s so much the opposite of what’s going on.” But maybe it wasn’t such a flex this time. She’s been feeling that fashion is too removed from reality, and, after giving it some more thought, she offered this statement. “I want to talk about women’s work, using my work. Across all, the apron is a symbol of work that can express multiple messages and ideas about all these different genres of work. And deeper, it talks about the effort and challenges of women.”
Aprons and pinafores were the pillars of the collection, from utilitarian to aestheticised by frills and fabrication as the show and the mood shifted from institutional work to the home. The casting was an astute stream of memorable faces, starting with actress Sandra Hüller, who has played some particularly memorable mothers, though maybe not especially reassuring ones. But that was okay, because Prada wanted to communicate pain as well as love, and the irony that something as essential as a woman’s work should be so overlooked. It’s that damn patriarchy, isn’t it? Richard Grant played Daddy in his leather apron. In a murmured aside, Prada mentioned Luis Buñuel’s 1964 film “Diary of a Chambermaid.” Jeanne Moreau plays a domestic slyly navigating her way through a household which is a paradigm of French fascism on the rise in the 1930s. Her crisp white apron assumes all the mystical power of a fetish object. Something that Prada also was fully aware of in this new collection.
Fetish. Fashion returns to that well again and again for refreshment. It’s a spirit that Nadège Vanhée infuses into her women’s collection for Hermès. “People expect an image of something quite pure and modest, I wanted to show something beyond that.” Like the beauteous Jeanne Cadieu, sensational in a red leather bra and jeans. It helps that Vanhée gets to work in endless iterations of the finest leathers known to humankind, and when they’re cut into bra tops and harnesses and tops and skirts that lace in subtly suggestive ways, they truly are “something beyond that.” She had me stroke a coat from a heritage calf skin that had been massaged with beeswax. It’s all in the hand.
Vanhée had been dreaming of the cowboys on the Camargue, the vast wetland in the South of France that rolls down to the Med. They’re called manadiers or guardians, and she wove their details into her collection: a duster coat, something from a saddle. Gypsy, bohemian, things she’d wanted to do for a while. It seemed very different from Vanhée’s startling last collection, where she’d been thinking about Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic black-leather-clad policiers with Alain Delon. She agreed it was a different character. She was into the pure boho spirit of singer Nico and her film “The Inner Scar,” which she made with Philippe Garrel in 1972. That was much more mood than literal influence on the catwalk, but it showed where Vanhée is prepared to take Hermès. And she insisted that she has a clientele who is happy to follow her. Remarkable.
Marcel Duchamp was reincarnated as a fashion designer on Junya Watanabe’s runway. The ingenious Watanabe paraded a collection of readymades that would have enchanted Duchamp. Almost the only thing missing was “Fountain,” his famous urinal, which launched the readymade revolution. But there were red platform shoes tangled into a bolero, straw hats, forks and spoons, trainers, rubber boots, suitcases, leather sandals mashed into a jacket… “exploring forms that could never be achieved through conventional methods,” according to Watanabe. Tracks from Brian Eno’s new album with Beatie Wolfe accompanied the presentation. They made a lyrical musical counterpoint to Watanabe’s way of working, the profound substance of the most ordinary bits of life, like a resource-starved world managing to rebuild from landfill. The readymades were mounted on foundations that had an appealing 1940s film noir feel to me. Isamaya Ffrench’s makeup amplified the sensation. It raised one fabulously quizzical eyebrow on each model’s face.
Glenn Martens told me to make sure and go to the bathroom before his ready-to-wear debut at Maison Margiela because I was going to pee myself laughing. That’s quite a build-up. He must have been talking about the children’s orchestra that played live through the show. They were utterly delightful, opening with “Also sprach Zarathustra” and playing greatest hits from the classical playbook with all the wanton glee and gravity of the enthusiastic amateur. Children always served Margiela well.
Martin Margiela himself apparently insisted that everything started with the shoulder and the shoe, and everything in between was just filling up. Martens had been working on new versions of both: a new jacket silhouette (paired with drop crotch pants) and no-heel footwear that he hoped might be competition for the inescapable Tabi. The twisted formality of the tailoring confirmed Martens’ worthy heir status. He experimented with shrinking and adding volume in jackets and coats by “stitching back,” or folding under, collars and lapels. The experiments with lace and organza trims taped onto slip dresses were a little more challenging, but Martens’ superpower is his embrace of challenge. He imagined a glass knit that could reflect the light. His supplier had a jelly fibre that had to be lubricated to be knitted. It would have landed at €25,000 ($29,000) — which means it should make it into the couture-level Artisanal collection.
Martens debuted with Artisanal last July. It’s a cliché that couture is the place where designers stretch their creative limbs, and maybe their innovations will make it into their ready-to-wear. The incredible wallpaper effect was here, the patchwork was delivered as a print. And the upcycled gemstones set in plastic carried over as fine jewellery. There was a full-on ballgown for a finale, the flare of its skirts tempered by tape, its torso a mess of melted nylon. Margiela’s transmogrifications are the stuff of legend. Martens added another one, with metal mouth guards that duplicated the four stitches that are the house emblem. Anonymity has always been a cornerstone of the brand. Hence, all the complex masking in Martens’ July debut. The mouth guards were this season’s masks, intended to anonymise the models as they walked with mouths agape. Mirth? Anguish? Up to you. I saw echoes of Dolarhyde’s “becoming” in “Red Dragon,” but that’s just me. Still, in a season where fear was a man’s best friend, it was one more telling gesture.