Power at play at Paris Fashion Week

Paris Fashion Week has begun unspooling, and the overarching message is about power. Considering that this year saw the reversal of Roe vs Wade, and that the protests against Mahsa Amini’s death in Tehran have now spread worldwide, female power is a subject worth revisiting. It is also about the power of fashion houses themselves — their ability to hammer home a message, to sell a dream and a product. 

What does female empowerment look like, for 2023? At Dior, it looked like a farthingale skirt and a platform shoe. Artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri was inspired by Catherine de’ Medici, an Italian who, via marriage to Henry II in 1533, entered French royalty. De’ Medici was considered the most important woman in Europe for most of the 16th century. She dressed for power, most notably increasing her height with heels and sporting black in mourning for her husband — a costly colour in those days, also indicative of her wealth and status. Christian Dior himself was a sucker for corsetry and petticoats, but Chiuri didn’t get bogged down in history. The collection looked best when teaming structured corsets, over cotton shirts, with easy trousers, like a pragmatic modern armour.

Gabriela Hearst has built responsibility into the ethos of both her namesake brand and Chloé. Backstage before her show for the latter, she enthused about fusion power — no joke — and the collection and show were an endorsement of the proposed fuel source, which would generate electricity using heat from nuclear fusion reactions. Hearst had recently visited an international nuclear fusion research and engineering project in the south of France, and translated elements of fusion power to her clothes. If you so choose, you can wear denim studded with grommets that mimic isotopes, or dress in knit mesh inspired by the components of a reactor.

It was a strange experience to be talked through the clothes backstage while at the same time being educated about the intricacies of alternative fuels, but Hearst is a self-declared nerd. And she demonstrated that the power of fashion as a tool for communicating messages can, thankfully, be more complex than the next move of the Kardashian-Jenner clan. I certainly never thought I would be googling fusion during fashion week.

Balmain’s message was loud and clear. The former is the operative word — creative director Olivier Rousteing staged a show, dubbed the Balmain festival, in a sports stadium for some 7,000 guests — a few of them fashion press, but most members of the public — who chomped burgers while cheering couture dresses and the musician Cher. She merely materialised alongside Rousteing for his bow, but it was enough to incite hysteria.

Rousteing’s collection was handsome — he took his inspiration from the painted ceilings of Versailles and splashed reproductions across clothes that were, like the palace itself, devised to dazzle and overwhelm observers. Some looks resembled nude statues, while others were printed with licking flames. The finale couture outfits were inspired by Africa and made from natural materials such as bark and branches (Rousteing’s birth parents come from the Somali Peninsula).

I kept returning to the shoes, which roped stone slabs to the heels as if his models were standing on pedestals. It is notable that, under Rousteing’s watch, Balmain has become a brand with a global resonance that can literally fill a stadium with fans. Cher was there to sell a handbag — she brandished it with glee in a video projected about 100 metres high. How’s that for power messaging?

No handbags were to be seen at Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent. “I want to dress a woman,” the designer said backstage before the show. It’s weird how few designers have made that statement recently. The Saint Laurent show was, like Balmain, open to public view and staged on a vast scale on an elaborate parterre with a huge fountain at the Place du Trocadéro, backdropped by the Eiffel Tower. Yet it still had a sense of intimacy. These clothes were devastatingly chic, with a sucker-punch aesthetic power. Pretty much every look was a floor-length jersey dress — some were draped, some knit, one chainmail patterned with leopard print, a few with structured coats thrown over them, gargantuan in the shoulder and tugged to the ankle. The colours were glorious — olive green, oxblood, inky blue, lilac bruise — like faded shades of a Polaroid picture. 

The power was palpable. On the one hand it was that of the brand — these clothes will photograph beautifully and are unmistakably Saint Laurent. You can trace the hooded dresses back to Yves Saint Laurent’s couture collections, from the 1960s to his retirement in 2002. The thumping great shoulders, too, originate in the designer’s archives, as did the great globules of gold jewellery at wrist and lobe. But it was also a vision of a woman at her most powerful and imposing, at a time when that is exactly what we need. Vaccarello wouldn’t be drawn on that subject. “When you go political in fashion, it looks like an opportunity to sell more bags,” he said. He prefers his clothes to do the talking. And besides, Saint Laurent’s revenue was up 42 per cent in the first half of 2022 year on year. Maybe it is selling enough.

Sales at Loewe have reportedly increased fivefold during the nine-year tenure of Jonathan Anderson. What is maybe even more valuable is that we all understand what Loewe stands for now: craft, concepts and nature, so handwoven raffia may sit next to injection-moulded silicone. The LVMH-owned brand’s identity was woozy before Anderson began. This season, giant anthurium flowers wound their way around bodices, sprouted from breasts, sat on shoes. “I like something in nature that looks fake but is real,” said Anderson backstage. “Proportion. Illusion. The idea of iconography — something that reminds us of something else.”

That’s the cleverness of Anderson’s Loewe, where ordinary and even humble objects and materials are put to extraordinary use, to create clothes that look like nothing else. Witness the shoes made from a bunch of deflated balloons that wound up resembling something between a Swiffer mop and a sea cucumber. The extraordinary thing was that, by the end of the show, you wanted to get your hands on a pair. Or, rather, your feet in them.

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