That the death of Iris Apfel, the geriatric influencer whose idiosyncratic sense of personal style made her a fashion star when she was well into her 80s, happened smack in the middle of Paris Fashion Week was both startling and oddly fitting. All the appreciations of her life and outfits have been adding up to pointed reminders of how this whole circus relates to the art of dressing, and the way clothing can be an interface with the world in the most expressive, original way.
I was thinking about that a lot over the weekend, in part because of the designers here who, like Apfel, have built empires (or at least small fiefs) on a willingness to go their own way — Rick Owens, Yohji Yamamoto. Designers with a deep understanding of the rules and history of fashion and an equally powerful ability to rewrite both, and to imagine a different world. One whose uniforms can look bizarre and outrageous, but which create a sense of thrilling possibility: clothes like permission slips to think out of the box.
And also because in Seán McGirr’s debut at Alexander McQueen, a house that once did all of the above, it got so very garbled.
The Power of the
Personal Voice
In any case, when it comes to singular visions, few have been as clear or as original as Rick Owens, whose grand visions marry the epic ambitions and glamour of Cecil B DeMille, offering the promise of a better future for the alienated and the outré. Still, the weirdest thing about his collection this season, shown in his home/headquarters in the heart of the French establishment behind the Assemblée Nationale, was just how — well, wearable it was.
The signature Owens silhouette was still there: bulbous at the top, attenuated in the middle, grounded at the bottom with what the designer, backstage, called his pyramid moon boots, so the body looked like a piece of taffy stretched between two poles. So was the extreme: dresses made from coils of ropes. But there were also fluted dresses knit on the bias, like the most cozy silver screen gowns, and sweeping Maid Marian capes; even ponchos with the word “Porterville,” the central California town where Owens grew up and that he escaped, splashed across the front. Ponchos! What?
“Now is not the moment for fireworks and smoke bombs,” Owens said before the show. “Now is the moment for everybody to cling together and to connect.” Instead of bombast, he offered balm, but without resorting to the carapace of normalcy.
This is also true of Yohji Yamamoto, another one of the great designers of our time, who has stayed true to his own increasingly intricate and detailed exploration of history and emotion even as it has trended in and out of fashion. In this he is like his friend, Azzedine Alaïa, and like Alaïa, whose single-minded pursuit of his own aesthetic had him first rejected and then rediscovered as a sort of guru before his death in 2017, Yamamoto is due for a reckoning.
He’s the last great romantic in fashion, and what makes his work extraordinary is that while it skitters across time and references, dipping into one era here, another one there, it also transforms them, folding them into a kind of Möbius strip all the designer’s own.
This season that meant Brancusi geometries and Edwardian suiting that turned to expose bustles like orchid origami — a combination that turned up in a different form at Junya Watanabe. He offered a sort of math-meets-the-bourgeoisie combination of sculpture, biker jackets and wallpaper florals that, like Yamamoto’s work, added up to a lot more than the sum of its parts. One staid black overcoat was hung with studded biker belts, looking like heraldic banners or Miss Universe sashes, as if a punk had stormed not just the henhouse, but the inner sanctum.
A Lesson to Remember
It is not insignificant that Owens and Yamamoto are two of the rare substantial independent designers working today: designers who started from nothing under their own names and built their brands as they saw fit, allowing themselves the luxury of developing their own points of view and material language.
And it makes it hard not to wonder what would happen if someone such as McGirr were allowed to design under his own name, rather than being asked to assume the mantle of a legend.
What if the big groups, such as Kering, which owns McQueen, invested in building new brands, rather than preserving and resurrecting old ones and cycling through designers to sort of reinvent them — but not too much! — the equivalent of demanding they start speaking in tongues?
In creating brands that could be, to quote musician Robert Fripp, “resplendent in divergence,” like the delightfully bizarro creations of Noir’s Kei Ninomiya. As Apfel showed, that may actually be the best look of all. — NYT
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