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By Timothy Hagy
A Sharper Image
Jean-Paul Knott is one of the set of emerging young French designers that the Fédération Française de la Couture has recently been promoting. His show, staged on opening day of the Paris calendar, offered a sharp and sophisticated look - light years from his fuzzy goth collections of the past. Draping and layering, whether in cotton sweaters sensuously falling from the shoulders, fox fur curling from the collars of licorice-colored trenches, or silvery chiffon tops worn atop cocktail dresses and over leggings, certainly cleared things up. The same motif spilled over into flowing sweater capes, and even to a terrycloth midnight blue robe, worn by a buff Black man atop a pair of silky boxer shorts. While Knott's palette was weighted heavily in black and gray, splashes of poppy-red and canary-yellow burst out in a flourish.
Showing women's and men's lines together has become de rigeur for smaller designers, who can not afford the luxury of staging them separately. Jean-Paul Gaultier is planning to follow suit on Wednesday, forced to cut his men's show last January as a result of financial pressure.
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 And interestingly, the floating layering in the men's pieces, right down to the full-cut trousers that billowed along the catwalk, was one of the highlights of today's show. We're in a new age, when the codes that separate the sexes are fast merging, and Knott seems to have focused in on that image of modernity - right down to the model carrying a cell phone as an accessory.
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