Paris fashion week fell back in love latex and the horsey set Friday, with Balmain rolling the clock back to the 1980s in a glitzy show that could have been called "Pretty Woman goes to the Polo Club".
With Celine's Hedi Slimane already committed to reviving the bourgeois
pearls and twin-set look, Balmain's artistic director Olivier Rousteing said
he wanted to democratise the clothes of the ruling classes.
"I spent countless hours dreaming and scheming about how I could cross
over, open doors and be accepted," he added.
Balmain's plan was to storm the bourgeois bastions in thigh-high latex boots, with a battalion of crack models led by battle-hardened older supermodels Helena Christensen and Esther Canadas.
"Out of my way buster, or I will batter you with my Balmain shoulder pad,"
quipped the New York Times' critic Vanessa Friedman of the collection in a
tweet from her front row seat.
Rousteing sent his diverse runway army out in glammed up versions of equestrian and upper-class classics, from blazers to a stunning pencil argyle dress and his take on gaucho ponchos.
Country set silk scarf prints ran through the collection, with their motifs
picked up in puff ball woollens enlivened with swathes of sequins.
The 33-year-old creator, who described himself as an orphan who did not
know his origins, was in reflective mood, with a film about his search for his
roots, "Wonder Boy", in the running for best documentary at the French Oscars,
the Cesars, late Friday.
"I realise that my search for answers about my past has helped me make it
clear how happy I am to be living in this present, in this Paris of new
possibilities, of fewer boundaries and more inclusion."
Family also ran through Virgil Abloh's Off-White show late Thursday, with the black American designer sending out supermodels Bella and Gigi Hadid as well as their mother Yolanda.
As with the Kardashians, it is hard to know with the Hadids who is the more
famous, with 56-year-old Yolanda a bestselling author as well as a former star
of the reality television show, "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills".
But the biggest surprise came at the Rick Owens show, where his flamboyant French wife Michele Lamy sported a bag modelled from Owens' own head.
With "Game of Thrones" actress Gwendoline Christie sitting next to her on the front row, it set tongues wagging wondering whether Brienne of Tarth had lopped off the American designer's head backstage.
Vogue called it "fashion's cheekiest It bag", and was particularly
impressed when Lamy produced her iPhone from a flap in the back of her
beloved's skull.
Even for Owens, one of fashion's true radicals, this was quite something. Meanwhile, the French designer Agnes b -- who has a huge following in Asia -- cancelled her Paris fashion week show that was due to the held on Monday because of the coronavirus and "the current global sanitary context". It is the third Paris show to be cancelled because of the virus.(AFP)
Photo courtesy of the Balmain