Festive, hedonist, pleasure-seeker, liberated, at the very limit unbridled: these are the adjectives that best describe the spirit of the Parisian men’s fashion session that closed on Sunday, once again in digital format with some live shows. As delightful as a can of salted caramel popcorn and a bottle of Krug grand cuvèe champagne, delivered to the home of the guests to watch the video Thom Browne; festive like the bag of fluorescent stars and neon bracelet – rave party genre – as a corollary of the show enclosed in two books by Loewe.
A liberating explosion
It was somewhat predictable, as a compensation for the difficult time we’re going through, and it doesn’t even seem to be quite over. If for some the answer to bad times it is a thoughtful simplicity, or an introspective lightness, for others it is on the contrary a blaze of color and madness. Certainly the answers are multiple: the canon of the past is unique, like the reviled patriarchy. The concentration of liberated pleasure-seekers is particularly high in Parisi, in frequency modulations ranging from dapper nonchalance in the colors of a Tuscan landscape of Paul Smith to the sophisticated kitsch of the Antwerp postcards of Dries Van Noten to surrealism in black with collage dresses and violent deconstructions of
Yohji Yamamoto
, whose way of expressing vitality is always intensely personal.
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It is dark and pagan, tribal and charged with an almost primordial vis the proof of
Riccardo Tisci for Burberry
The party is a state of mind
Gives Loewe, Jonathan Anderson talks about energy and hedonism, and embraces the whole spectrum of neon fluorescences. “I think the role of fashion is, every season, to paint an ideal picture, sparking the desire to be part of it,” says Anderson via Zoom. The hedonist painting, complete with glittering sequins, animal prints and circular openings that reveal portions of the body, Anderson paints it comprehensively. The collection is in fact presented through two books that represent the beginning and the end of the path: a monograph on the painter Florian Krewer, whose urban nocturnes are the scenes that triggered the creative process, and a photographic volume by David Sims, a layered document and psychedelic of the clothes themselves, seen on a cast of men of different ages and physical types. The effect is liberating and enveloping.
The desecrating approach of fashion
Fashion does not live by parties alone, but there is certainly an irreverent and festive way of tackling important issues of the contemporary debate. Serhat Isik and Benjamin Huseby in art GmbH (newly appointed creative directors of Trussardi) perform an act of inverse colonialism. Tired of having to justify their origins – Turkish and Pakistani respectively – due to their slightly darker skin than normal, they take a journey through the clichés of the white world – high class elegance and country club snobbery above all – and transform them in inspiration, just as fashion creators, classically, have used travel and contacts with exotic cultures as material to be reworked from season to season. The result is powerful, not least because Isik and Huseby start from female codes, abundantly camp, to dress their machos, and this creates a further decolonization, with electric shock. In the midst of so much reflection, there is also excellent tailoring, which certainly does not hurt.