PARIS — There has been a lot of talk recently about the under representation of women in positions of power when it comes to industries such as film and technology. Less discussed, but equally startling when you look at the numbers, is how few women are designers at the head of major fashion brands (or even minor ones). Of the 91 shows on the official Paris schedule, fewer than 20 percent are brands with female creative directors (or their titular ilk). Where are the women?
It’s not clear (and this would be the subject of an entirely different story in any case) — and there’s no question that the female representation is better now than it has been and that it is in other cities — but of the women who have arrived, some of the biggest names appeared on the same days in the final stretch of the spring 2016 season.
This quasi girl ghetto may be a coincidence of the schedule (and of creative appointments), in the same way the Japanese are largely grouped together over the weekend, but it does have a kind of odd implication: that there is some sort of sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits.
It’s time to put an end to the stereotype.
Certainly Stella McCartney’s guiding principle has always been her own insouciant brand of cool, shared largely by the friends who populate her front row — women like Dasha Zhukova and Suki Waterhouse — and expressed this time around in thin knit plaid polo shirts twisted onto the diagonal and lengthened into dresses; two-tone strapless pleated tunics and skirts, both cut on the curve to rise over a hip or a knee and dip down on the other; and relaxed trousers and long jackets shaped to the body and covered in ribbons of curlicues. All temptingly non-neurotic, with a winking edge.
And patently less complicated than the hybrid aesthetic of Chitose Abe atSacai, which was born from an effort to question received diktats about what clothing is worn when, and where daywear morphs into evening wear, and outer wear becomes inner wear, often all in the same garment.
This season she was cutting and pasting (and twisting and torquing) a travelogue of sorts, from silks printed with cheerful souvenir cityscapes and gardens to reminders of the American West — bandannas and rhinestone cowboy prints and Navajo blanket stripes — all recombined into dresses and separates that worked best when the ideas were layered lightly one atop the other. Trousers sliced up the legs like skirts had a two-for-one appeal, but skirts that gaped at the legs or the back to expose their alternate inner workings or that bunched at the waist seemed pointlessly convoluted.
Conventional wisdom has it that female designers make clothes they want to wear, and that male designers make clothes they want to see their dream woman wear; the latter speaking more to fantasy, the former to functionality. But that’s too reductive an explanation, and one that no longer holds true — when it comes to either gender.
There is no question, for example, that Giambattista Valli can’t quite seem to stop idealizing the decorative potential of the 1960s and ’70s, iterating version after version of high-necked, high-waisted, high-hemlined sparkling shifts and suits, only to follow with floor-sweeping silk hostess dresses, retro-perfect for anyone eager to hitch a flying carpet to the past.
But at Akris, Albert Kriemler found his muse (if you can even call it that) in the work of the architect Sou Fujimoto, and sent out abstract geometric prints and Swiss-cheese-like cutouts in crisp white cotton shirts and shorts; shift dresses tiered in a corkboard print and flashing a peekaboo square at the hip; and terrific gold and silver trouser suits, hexagons etched into the weft. Though shorts with long half-skirts on top (a weird styling trick that has inexplicably popped on other runways as well) built a neat visual structure, they are probably going to be a hard sell.
Such distilled constructions exist seemingly at the opposite extreme from the glorious fantasia of Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen, all Huguenot migrants and 17th-century Spitalfields silk weavers and rose bowers, in sweeping vistas of long, ruffled floral jacquards, frayed lace and frock coats.
Also, there were trousers cut on a knife-edge and sleeveless vests draped in pearl-trimmed silver watch fob chains; dove-embroidered bias-cut black and white gowns; even gem-encrusted couture-detailed denim. It all seemed like high romanticism of the most ethereal kind — until you looked at the shoes.
Which were clogs. Inlaid and elaborate, yes, but entirely grounded.
Ms. Burton has slowly and subtly been sanding away at the harder, darker edges established by the brand’s founder, Mr. McQueen — the body-reshaping corsetry and face-erasing masks — and this collection was, despite its fairy tale veneer, her most liberated yet.
In the end, the clothes were made for action, not static posing. They were a stride forward
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