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Valentino
A conversation with Pier Paolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri before the presentation of their new couture collection for Valentino quickly took a turn for the metaphysical. "If you don't think about fashion, you just do clothes," said Piccioli. "Fashion needs culture or it becomes empty." The duo found their cultural spine in the finest flowering of French thought, keying in on the eighteenth century's Age of Enlightenment and particularly the return to "real" values that Rousseau endorsed in his State of Nature philosophy. "Couture is a real value," Piccioli added. "It's not superficial."

But it was Marie Antoinette role-playing in her little farm on the grounds of Versailles who provided the collection's ambience. The first model seemed to arrive in the salons of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild on a breath of cool country air. Sprigged flower prints covered almost everything. An antique fabric alchemy transformed taffeta into equally antique-looking blurred floral chaîne. The sense of precious old artisanship was also evident in the swirling bouilloné decoration. The volumes were diaphanous, bucolic, like the cloud of point d'esprit scattered with organza lace cutouts. The designers sought a "deep lightness." It was beautifully exemplified in dresses with up to five layers of lace and organza.

Examined up close in the atelier, the workmanship defied comprehension. The stitching was so fine it was invisible. It signaled the heart-stopping delicacy that distinguished the collection. But there was a real resilience, too. Hence the use of cotton amidst the lace, organza, and filigree, as in a coat with tone-on-tone embroidery that felt embossed. Hence also the flat shoes, which loaned their own kind of grace to the purity of an ivory coat dress decorated with tiny spirals (Piccioli compared them to stucco). A chaîne skirt had deep, useful pockets. Smocking was a rustic detail. There was a casual quality that made the clothes ultimately feel more modern than their long-sleeved, high-necked, and lace-gloved propriety would at first suggest.

Chiuri pointed out that she and Picciolo come from an accessories background, where they learned to tell a big story with a small object. That skill is now writ large in the collections they are designing at Valentino. Today's story was their most exquisite yet.


—Tim Blanks

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Maxime Simoens
Dressing Beyoncé for the cover of her album can do a lot for a designer's front row. Beth Ditto was whooping it up in Maxime Simoens' audience today, perhaps shopping for an outfit of her own for her upcoming release. The quotient of influential editors in attendance was higher, too.

Simoens, a cinema buff, traded in last season's Nosferatu inspiration for a film of a more recent vintage, Gaspard Noé's Tokyo-set piece Enter the Void. But despite the decades separating the movies, the two collections were consistent, with slim silhouettes and graphic embellishments dominating both. If the mosaic-like tiles on a long strapless dress and a structured short-sleeve jacket didn't quite evoke the "entirely new take on contemporary Japan" that the show notes augured, there was promise in Simeons' vibrantly color-blocked mousseline dresses. And it was likewise refreshing to see a designer using embroidery—in this case nail-head studs on black crepe—in a forward-looking way.

As for Ditto, we can see her rocking one of Simoens' fitted cocktail dresses. Their organza wings will come in handy for stage-diving.


—Nicole Phelps

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John Galliano
Now why do you think Bill Gaytten chose Tippi Hedren as the inspiratrice for Galliano's pre-fall collection? The glacial Hitchcock blonde represented consummate grace under pressure, even when angry birds were tearing at her flesh. There must have been plenty of moments over the past half-year when this designer knew exactly how she felt.

Of course, there's a simpler explanation. Utter the words "Hitchcock blonde" and visions of immaculate tailoring and precise elegance spring to mind. And that's just what Gaytten was after with his dressy looks pulled together with head scarves and gloves. The hip-shaped jacket with a pleated neckline belted over a pencil skirt was typical. Trompe l'oeil scarf detailing added some old Hollywood swank to a coat that was already glamorous in crocodile jacquard.

Old-school screen glamour is a Galliano staple. Here, it was evoked with liberal use of gold lamé, guipure lace, and the bias-cut gowns that are the label's signature item. A polka-dot devoré was particularly striking. Once again, Gaytten proved that he's the one true keeper of the Galliano flame, but you can't help wondering what he's got up his own sleeve.
—Tim Blanks

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Bottega Veneta
Not unlike his last runway collection, Tomas Maier's pre-fall lineup had a smart, urban look. And not just because the graphic print on a stretch jersey sheath was inspired by the windows of New York skyscrapers at night. Maier has a good sense for what a city girl (one with a hefty bank account, naturally) needs, from that day-to-evening sleeveless dress to a statement coat (it doesn't get bolder than his gold-dipped shearling bomber) to dressed-up yet unfussy tailoring. The best example of that was a suit in espresso brown stretch polyester, one part tuxedo and the other part track pants. A liquid gold evening dress with miles of fabric in its floor-length skirt had a similar sense of ease. There was more gold to be found on the collection's accessories. Your average city girl might not really and truly need a leather clutch with hand-painted metallic edges, but we can think of plenty who'd desire it.
—Nicole Phelps

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Elie Saab
Elie Saab's reputation as a red-carpet designer is well earned. Everyone from Jessica Biel to Halle Berry to current Oscar nominee Bérénice Bejo has name-checked him at one awards show or another. But women, even women of the movie star variety, can't live on diamanté-encrusted evening gowns alone. So Saab has been emphasizing daywear in his pre-collections of late. Here, he took a strict, almost minimalist approach, cutting most of his suits and dresses in monotone shades of nude, blue, or black and keeping decorative details like a fox collar, a peplum waist, or contrast piping to a minimum. His formal options followed the same principle: Yes, there was beading, but it came in chevrons of matte and shiny sequins, which gave the form-fitting gowns a modern, graphic feel.
—Nicole Phelps

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Jean Paul Gaultier
Amy Winehouse might be a hard act to follow musically, but her personal style was so cartoon-graphic that it loans itself easily to carbon copies. Jean Paul Gaultier proved as much today with his latest show. The beehive, the eye makeup, the beauty spot, the clothes with their tarty fifties flavor, like the gang leader's girlfriend in a teens-running-wild exploitation pic—all these were present and incorrect on Gaultier's couture catwalk. Wait, couture? The last refuge of everything that is rare, precious, and beautiful in the world of fashion? And Amy Winehouse, resolute wearer of baby-boy-size Fred Perry polo shirts?

Yet, unlikely as the union may seem, Gaultier managed to turn his couture presentation into both a celebratory send-off for Winehouse and a colorful addition to his gallery of beautiful oddities. That polo shirt was sexed up and alchemized into a back-buttoning dress with a G where the Fred Perry logo would be. Amy's tiny waist and penchant for pencil skirts shaped the silhouette, with a lot of help from London's corsetry wizard, Mr. Pearl (in fact, the show was as much about him as it was Winehouse). And the singer's brazen, devil-may-carelessness goosed the color palette (Karlie Kloss, camping and vamping in a huge green taffeta trench, followed on the heels of a guipure lace column in lurid orange). There was also a dishabille edge, with necklines draping asymmetrically, jackets slipping off shoulders, and bosoms bursting ripely forth.

Excess ultimately overwhelmed Winehouse, so it was true to her spirit that it had the same effect here—and there. Vinyl leggings will no longer be mentioned in polite company. But the couture spirit of JPG managed to assert itself with pieces like the pinstripe suit jacket that fell away into a shawl on one side, or a languidly decadent satin peignoir over jet-beaded pants, or a corset-backed gray silk parka that flipped open to reveal a lining of pink sequins.

At the finale, the models paraded in veils. Mourners? Brides? Handmaidens of Amy? Four guys performed doo-wop versions of Winehouse's songs throughout. They looked just like the Dap-Kings, who backed her on Back to Black. Really, all that was missing was the woman herself. So sad.


—Tim Blanks

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Damir Doma
Damir Doma's pre-fall lineup had the same multiethnic sensibility as his men's collection. "Bohemian techno" is how he described that show last week. The emphasis here was on bohemian, with capes and dressy shorts inspired by raw carpets, a high-necked blouse in a print lifted from an Oriental rug, and a pantsuit constructed from a tapestry-like fabric. Many-stranded necklaces of chunky beads added to the effect, along with even chunkier fur vests and coats.

Still, the results were resolutely urban. Doma confessed to growing up a Helmut Lang fan (he's Croatian but lived in southern Germany, close to the Austrian border), and he clearly absorbed the design star's modernist tendencies. The big takeaway here was Doma's strong yet soft tailoring.


—Nicole Phelps

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Armani Privé
The worlds of fashion and show business collided at Giorgio Armani's couture show today in an entirely unprecedented way. Just before the show started, Jessica Chastain, settled in the front row, heard that she'd been nominated for an Oscar. There were shrieks, there were cheers, but Chastain held back the tears till Armani himself presented her with a massive bouquet backstage after the show. Now that's PR.

Given that thunder-stealing moment, you might imagine that the collection would be slightly back-seated, but it was almost as if Armani had anticipated the competition, because he rolled out his most persuasive couture outing to date. It helped that his theme was metamorphosis, with particular emphasis on the snake, whose powers of persuasion are legendarily recorded in best-selling novels like the Bible. The snake sheds skin, the butterfly emerges from a chrysalis—both natural processes influenced the silhouettes of the collection. The skirts, for one thing, which were deeply folded like a pod. Or the evening pieces, where a sequined bodice slithered out of a swag of silk.

Maybe Armani had been looking at the serpentine photos of Guido Mocafico, because the color palette starred the same absinthe-bright, disconcerting green of Mocafico's snakes, just as the prints had the same coiled intensity and the shiny fabrics duplicated the soft sheen of snakeskin. The mesh laid over jackets and skirts looked like reptile scales, the crocodile was obviously the real thing.

But the other message of the couture show was man-made—a shrugged-off casualness, jackets on shoulders, hair tousled (maybe too much so). The strong contrast made for a strong show. And if Jessica Chastain believes in lucky charms, we know what she'll be wearing come Oscar night.


—Tim Blanks

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Yigal Azrouël
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.

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Givenchy
Riccardo Tisci is in a reflective mood. Pre-fall, men's, and now his Couture collection have found him looking back over his first seven years at Givenchy and reworking familiar pieces with what he described as a new maturity. "To me, the mark of a successful designer is having an identity," he said, citing Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace, and Lagerfeld's Chanel. We'd say that Tisci more than qualifies.

His ten-piece Couture lineup was divided into three rooms. The first was devoted to crocodile, and what the Givenchy atelier has done to the precious skin is positively jaw-dropping. For a long, clingy dress, the scales on the hide were individually cut and numbered, then bleached, dyed, and resewn one by one in order onto a tulle body stocking. It took 350 hours to make. The artisans who worked on a cropped and fitted jacket (with the same star motif as the designer used in his menswear show) perhaps didn't log as many hours, but the payoff was just as impressive.

Tisci said his two inspirations this season were the 1927 Fritz Lang movie Metropolis and the theme music from a more obscure Russian film, 1924's Aelita: Queen of Mars (add that one to your Netflix queue, pronto). You could see their influence most clearly in the Art Deco embellishments on the dresses in the crystal room. The designer also pointed out the parallels between Lang's high-city/low-city film and his own bejeweled gowns worn over workmen's tank tops. In fact, the tanks weren't as proletarian as all that, coming as they did in a cashmere blend.

The standout in the black and white room was a white silk T-shirt tucked into a black silk cady skirt that unzipped almost all the way up to the right hip, the white sequin lining only flashing when the model walked by. In a week of ball gowns as wide as they are high and beads by the bushel, it takes a special maturity to exercise that kind of restraint, but in its own subtle way, it showcased the same kind of bravado as did the models' nose rings and doorknocker-size hoops. This is a designer with confidence to spare.
—Nicole Phelps

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Salvatore Ferragamo
Following the tropical vacation that was Spring 2012, Massimiliano Giornetti has put Ferragamo back on paved ground. Travel was still at the forefront of his mind, but of a different variety. He opted to show the collection in Milan, following the menswear shows, in a private room of the city's train station reserved for royalty waiting out their departures. The message was clear enough: These clothes are sensible enough to ride the rails, but luxe enough for a princess.

The collection was in a lower key than some of Giornetti's recent hits, which walked a fine line between less and more. (Take his houndstooth collection for Fall, which kept silhouettes classic while exploding the print to cartoon scale—Anna Dello Russo, who knows something about cartoon scale herself, was a fan.) You wouldn't expect to see ADR in the more pragmatic pieces on display here, to say nothing of the kitten heels. But there was a kicky, sixties-inflected charm to the pleated skirtsuits, sweater sets, and capes, especially as enlivened by helpings of velvet and python. (One twinset featured python-laced argyle—good girl gone slithery.) And the exotic-skin portfolios and hard-shell makeup cases look like reason enough to take any show on the road.
—Matthew Schneier

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J.W. Anderson
The buzz has been building for J.W. Anderson, but his first pre-fall collection suggests the ever-increasing attention hasn't turned his head. The big retailers and magazines have come knocking, but the man retains the courage of his convictions. So when pressed for the guiding spirit behind his new collection, he offers, "people who work in food shops." And then, to clarify: he's "playing with lots of ugly colors, like in McDonald's, or Tesco."

It'd be hard to go farther to the wrong side of the tracks. But good taste is a piety for which Anderson doesn't have much time. Debating it is part of his constant conversation. And it's given a tannic spark to his collections, this one included. His swingy A-line skirts and quilted suits are part schoolgirl, part hausfrau. They have a vintage twinge, but rendered in Op Art, they're clearly from no time and nowhere but Andersonland, a place as in thrall to its own off-kilter laws as Wonderland.

Back to that statement of intent: It'd be easy to get caught up in the word ugly. But the operative one here is play. All the more so because pre-fall substituted a breezier collection of snappy, Tesco-bright pieces, including plenty of the knits for which Anderson's become justly acclaimed, for some of the more complicated, architectural investigations he shows on the runway. Fun! And in a surely related bit, he's having a good time, too. "I'd do a collection every month if I had money to," he said.
—Matthew Schneier

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Elie Saab
Elie Saab is a name you hear on the red carpet more and more these days. What makes the Lebanese designer so popular with the Hollywood crowd? An influential celebrity stylist told us, "His dresses are shiny, uncomplicated, and easy to digest." That sums up Saab's new Couture offering quite well. He showed full-skirted party frocks and slim evening gowns in a rainbow of pastel shades, nearly all of them sparkly. What separated one from the next was the vertiginousness of a neckline, the presence or absence of sleeves, the length of a train, and the occasional cape. He included one print, an oversize botanical, but it looked like an afterthought amid all that pink, peach, yellow, mint green, and baby blue.

Our stylist friend neglected to mention one thing in her explanation of Saab's success: lightness. Despite all the handwork, these dresses—with the exception of an uncharacteristically heavy wedding gown—appeared almost weightless. That's gotta count for something when you could be walking away from the Oscars with a statuette.
—Nicole Phelps

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Gary Graham
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.

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Andrew Gn
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.

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Gabriele Colangelo
Just when you're ready to sound the death knell for prints, along comes Gabriele Colangelo's first pre-fall collection. The Italian up-and-comer designed a gorgeous forest-scape suffused in either chartreuse or fire engine red that made a strong argument for another season of bold color and pattern. We'll be surprised if one street-style star or another doesn't snap up the sharply cut lapel-less coat in the collection's final look for the upcoming fashion show circuit.

With statement-making prints like that, Colangelo was smart to keep silhouettes clean and simple. The minimal streak extended to a pair of faux fur coats that were as streamlined as they were shaggy. Those look like they could be a hit with the fashion crowd, too.
—Nicole Phelps

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Jean Paul Gaultier
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.

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Christian Dior
In a similar way to the couture parade yesterday, the Dior pre-fall collection stuck to the house codes. But whereas the made-to-measure clothes had a relatively experimental x-ray edge, the ready-to-wear was more approachable. That's not to say undone. The Dior woman loves to get "dressed," be it in a bar jacket with a subtle peplum and an elongated pencil skirt or a black patent-leather coat belted snugly at the waist. The most memorable look was a narrow, blush-pink column gown with a long-sleeve jacket on top that was split down the back and trimmed in gold embroidery. As of Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after the Oscar nominations were announced, it was still unclaimed, but we can't imagine it will stay that way for long.


—Nicole Phelps

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