Dhe flowers sprouted from every corner. They jumped out of the neckline at the top, climbed out from under the hem at the bottom, and in the end the last model was a single large rose. Giambattista Valli let his imagination blossom in all directions. And if a bustier dress turned out to be short and skimpy, the Italian fashion designer would at least attach a train to it, so long and so fluffy that the models could hardly get through the aisles in the end. One model was literally stuck in the front row for a moment. Was that symbolic? A twist of fate? Had the fashion gods intervened in this show?
Giambattista Valli, a favorite of the beautiful and rich Roman women, who has been presenting his collections at Paris Haute Couture Week for more than a decade, wants to stand out, yes, he has to stand out, if only for business reasons. The brighter the colors, the fluffier the organza dresses, the more crazy the idea – the bigger the applause.
No wonder, because with haute couture you don't have to win over any of these sober or bad-tempered buyers in the front row, after all, the handmade individual pieces are not sold in department stores and boutiques all over the world, but directly from the brands' ateliers in Paris . No, it's not important that the clothes in the store are convincing. Here the customers in the front row have to be put in the mood to buy.
The customers from the Middle East are thrilled
And Valli does it well. The applause for all the oversized creations is huge. The customers from the Middle East are thrilled. So you can be seen at major festivals in Abu Dhabi and Jeddah, in a unique look for a unique woman. When customers come to his studio near Place Vendôme in the days after the show, the brand pays attention to the geographical distance. The sprawling red flower dress? You can sell it to Dallas and Dubai, but not to Doha and Dubai. Just imagine two ladies wearing the same dress to the Dallas Opera or a wedding on the Persian Gulf! What would the investment of probably more than 50,000 euros have brought?
Fashion is a radically applied art. The fashion designer is guided by the wishes of his customers. And it's not just at Valli that these are mainly women from the Middle East. They love flashy dresses, decorated, embroidered, crazy. And they are changing the designers' view of fashion, including for this spring – because in haute couture it is always about the following season, in prêt-à-porter it will now be about autumn and winter.
Therefore, Valli's spring collection seems strange, more Eastern than Western, still art, but with a large dose of kitsch. There's a compliment in that: the designer knows how to adapt to women. But there is also a danger in this: that couture ends in an aesthetic dead end.
Daniel Roseberry even ennobles kitsch
At the beginning there is nothing to indicate this. On Monday morning, the newly blossomed brand of the legendary Elsa Schiaparelli shows that you can draw deeply from Parisian traditions and still offer something completely new. Ironically, Daniel Roseberry is a New World designer who does this with a startlingly fresh approach. For example, the dress for Hana Soukupova, consisting of motherboards, cell phones, even a computer fan from the pre-iPhone era, as if it were a piece by Paco Rabanne, a bit heavy, as the Czech model says, but definitely wearable – and with the amazing Statement that Schiaparelli's method of sewing everything onto the clothes still works today, especially if you can also promote recycling.
Then there are the gold glasses that Jennifer Lopez photogenically puts on for the front row, just a dull reflection of the ideas. But even the highest craftsmanship can be broken down into Hollywood-appropriate “merch”. Who could do that as well as an American designer? Daniel Roseberry, who drives this brand forward so precisely, even ennobles the kitsch.
Others drown in it. It's amazing what the fashion chamber allows for Haute Couture Week, the high mass of all the fashion weeks that grandly call themselves “Fashion Week”. Should only technical criteria apply to couture, i.e. an own atelier and predominantly craftsmanship? Or wouldn't aesthetic coherence also matter?
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