New names at Dior and Chanel have generated the most noise at this Paris fashion week, but it was Balenciaga’s debut that brought the media storm with a front row coup: Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, making her first European appearance in three years.
On Saturday night in Paris, Dior, Chanel – and Lauren Sanchez, who also attended the show – were all outdone for razzle dazzle.
Until that point, the mood music around Pierpaolo Piccioli’s debut had felt relatively serene.
Balenciaga is a venerated house, and Piccioli a world-leading designer, but he is also beloved for being the nicest man in fashion, and it was assumed that catwalk stunts had left the Balenciaga building with the departure of provocateur designer Demna for Gucci.
But even nice guys pull surprises sometimes, and the royal benediction turned up the hoopla. Meghan’s choice of Balenciaga – a French house founded by a Spaniard with an Italian designer - was notable for the absence of any links to Britain.
Intriguingly, the theme of Piccioli’s “manifesto”, as he described the collection backstage, was female emancipation.
His starting point was Cristóbal Balenciaga’s 1957 sack dress, a silhouette that sits proud off the body to neither amplify nor constrict a woman’s curves.
The look was a radical expression of a zeitgeist that was beginning to shift from 1950s conservatism towards the 1960s, said Piccioli. “It was about progress for women. It freed women from the weight of clothes that sit on their body and talk about their body. The sack dress allowed women to be free in space.”
Clothes that hold their own shape are at the heart of Balenciaga. Piccioli likened this way of designing to being an architect: building shapes that never touch the body, but all the while thinking about the humans who will move within.
“Cristóbal Balenciaga was obsessed with the body and with fabric, and with a third element – the air between the two,” he said.
Piccioli, who at 58 wears strings of beads and charms around his neck and exudes an air of hippie-ish serenity, isn’t interested in seeing fashion as an ego battle. It is “cooler”, he says, for designers to appreciate each other’s talents.
First on to the catwalk was a reworking of the sack dress, elongated to an ankle-skimming hem, worn with opera gloves – but also with wraparound bug-eye sunglasses that were a direct hat-tip to the apocalypse-chic of Balenciaga’s Demna era.
Piccioli said he was hoping for a “reconciliation” between the couture roots of the house, and its streetwear era. Balenciaga’s most iconic silhouettes were included in the show: a “cocoon” coat, this time in poison green, and a trapeze dress in violent purple.
The French-girl chic industrial complex is a modern money-spinner. Michael Rider is an American man, but he speaks this fashion language fluently.
Rider worked closely with Phoebe Philo during her tenure at the house, and then spent six years building Polo Ralph Lauren into a flagship for accessible taste. Now back at Celine, he is bringing the inclusive spirit of Polo to Parisian style.
So there were trenchcoats, straw baskets, and silk scarves tied around bags – all the motifs of French-girl chic – done in sunny colours, with an upbeat American tone.
“Celine isn’t a mean brand, or a brand that wants to exclude people,” Rider said after the show. “I hope that everyone feels desirable in Celine. When you wear this brand you may not have the strangest thing, but you have the best coat, and you have the attitude to wear it.”
