Said without moralisms, catastrophes and millenarianisms, this is, in every respect, the age of banality. Everything is so superficial and fast that it simplifies without hesitation and without thought, nullifying ideas. Fashion is no exception. What we are seeing in Paris these days, with the due exceptions, is of a disconcerting banality . The rediscovery of body and sensuality has given rise to a whole re-emergence of bumps and necklines and adherences that are very predictable. The restoration in progress, then, seems to be a step backwards, as if there was nothing to be learned from the recent past events. Those who reflect and re-elaborate – few but good – however make the leap forward.
Jonathan Anderson explores new avenues
This is the case of Jonathan Anderson, who at Loewe (maison of the LVMH group) breaks the mold he himself created and unhinges a successful recipe to probe new waters, decidedly sexual and experimental, even at the cost of appearing pretentious (runway look on the right, pictured above). As often happens in moments of rebirth, to move forward Anderson looks back: even to the late Italian Renaissance, and in particular to the painter Jacopo Carrucci, known as Pontormo, a key figure in the figurative transition to mannerism. From Pontormo’s best-known painting, the Deposition kept in Florence in Santa Felicita, Anderson captures the palette of pastels under acid, the fluttering drapery, the sense of a swirling composition, one might say hysterical. Experiment without hesitation, looking left and right – there is much mention of Japanese design as well as Hussein Chalayan – playing with the body and its distortions to the sound of draperies, protrusions, metal plates, bustiers like anamorphic mirrors, portholes, liquefactions, ranging from graphic black to sequins at the limit of kitsch to jeans. There is a lot on the catwalk, bordering on confounding, as always for Loewe: a whirl that can also stun, but this time energizes for the simple joy of creating without restraints and without limits. Everything is held and everything returns, from the music to the naked and immense set.
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The path of the Japanese fashion houses
The temperature, of course, is cold, but it is a cold that does not repel. From Issey Miyake, Satoshi Kondo, currently leading the design team, returns to work on the silhouette, which is liquid, malleable, vertical and concrete. In this process, the Miyake woman regains presence and strength, after years of childishness, but also acquires a thoughtful serenity that is new. The more the years go by, the events, the fashions, the more Yohji Yamamoto confirms himself as the poet of black, liquid deconstruction, punk crinolines. At the shows of this master one regularly expects certain things, which invariably come true and materialize. Yet reiteration is never repetition. The nuances of the utterance are always different despite the basic monotony. It strikes, every time, the abrasive lyricism, the never affected grace, the wisdom of the tailoring work.
The courage to experiment by Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli
Pierpaolo Piccioli is free and light, who from Valentino (runway look on the left, pictured above) the process of redesigning the codes of the maison continues with a sure air. P.iccioli, like Rick Owens and Anderson, is one of those designers who used the pandemic suspension as an opportunity to think out of self-imposed clichés and unhinge pre-established schemes. The show format is new, permeable flow between inside and outside, catwalk and sidewalk, stage fiction and reality; the incisive lightness of the dresses is new, deprived of the affected touches, but not of the preciousness, loaded with decisive and personal chromatic choices: immediate pieces that nevertheless maintain the couture imprint of the maison. The collection, presented in a co-ed format, mixes anastatic re-editions of some archival items with a whole series of pieces with generous volumes and saturated colors, and then white shirts and jeans, all equipped with flat sandals or amphibians. It is Piccioli’s family lexicon, subjected to beneficial editing, worn by a cast of unconventional types – but with standard physicality. The effect should be unsettling, and in part it also results, albeit within the congenital limits of this type of operation. On the catwalk, in fact, the fiction remains so, even when the tranche de vie is proposed. For this round, however, clothes are enough: in their vibrant synthesis they are themselves the re-signification of the code. Piccioli is the first to know this when he says, adamant: “The more time passes, the more I want the clothes to speak for themselves.”