Fashionlines Online Magazine
Fashion & Trends People & Places Art & Design Beauty & Health Shopping About Us Editor's Note
This Season's Trends

Customize Your Style >
Chantal's Secret:>
Versace Luxe Jewelry >
Could Fashion Soon Sing the Blues? >
Risks and Rewards of the Birkin Bag >
Let the Fur Fly >
Tom Ford Visits Oxford >
Family Jewels >
LA Finds >
Ins and Outs of 2005 >
Young Parisian Chic>
Couture Snowbunny>
Haute Couture Fashion Week>
Paris Men's Fashion on the Move>
São Paulo Fashion Week >
In the Bag >
My Couture Valentine
>

Featured Designers
Vivienne Westwood >
Jenni Kayne >
Paris Updates >
Brasil Anunciação >
as four Interview >
New West Coast Designers >
Elsa Schiaparelli >
Louis Verdad >
Au Bar with Alber >
Troubled Times at Jean Paul Gaultier>
Fashion Blues >
Passing the Torch at Geoffery Beene>
Hilfiger Buys Lagerfeld >
The Legend of Winston>
All in the Mists of Time >
LVMH Sells Lacroix Couture >
Spring 2005 Carol Christian Poell >
A Jeweled Passion >
Runway Report
Haute Couture - Spring '05 >
São Paulo Fashion Week >
Paris Men's Wear - Fall '05 >
Paris - Fall '05 >
Milan - Fall '05 >
NY - Fall '05 >
LA - Spring '05 >
London - Fall '05 >
SF Fashion Week >

All Shadows and Deliverance

By Timothy Hagy

PARIS, January 29 - In the shadowy darkness of a cold January night, Raf Simons delivered one the finest shows of Paris men's week. His label will celebrate the10-year mark with a retrospective in Florence next June, sponsored by Pitti Uomo, but it's really during the last three years that the avant-garde Belgian designer has come into fashion's limelight. He has his finger on the pulse of a rapidly changing world: foreseeing 9/11 two months in advance, and connecting with the accelerating cadence of disenfranchised youth worldwide.

By Saturday night, I had just about had it. After a day full of lackluster men's shows, featuring designers with absolutely nothing to say, and conglomerates with little of interest to merchandize, I went to the Simons' show with hope. And what I found there was a sort of redemption.

The concrete floor in the 70s-era Porte de la Villette structure was strewn with 50 TV monitors in an arrangement that was itself contemporary art. The moment the first model hit the runway, at about 10:40 p.m., it was clear that Simons had a lot to communicate. What we saw - oversized ribbed collars that wound around a leather jacket, rubber scuba-pants molded to the thighs, leotards with half-moon cutouts on the back of the knee, a bomber puffed up like a life preserver, over-sized high-top trousers wound with a macramé of leather belts (crotches dropping erotically with button down flies) - said a lot about the future. These were clothes for the kids of today, and the men of tomorrow. Looking about that room, filled to the brim with off-duty models, clumps of pale-faced Teutonic boys, men of every color in the rainbow, editors speaking in a babble of lingual cacophony, you could see that the theme struck a common chord.

From a fashion standpoint, the immaculate tailoring of thin Spencer-like jackets sheered at the waist, shirts affixed with a discreet silver logo, an amazing layered suit combination trailed by split skirt-like tails, lapels with a strange vertical appendage, all of it was striking. Even a lacquered trench coat had been meticulously tweaked until it floated ethereally when put into motion. The silhouette at times looked pseudo ecclesiastical - capes, habits, a whiff of Benedictine.

If there was a somber darkness to the collection, more or less mimicked by the gargoyles that framed the invitation, then so be it. This is an age when very few lights brighten the horizon. The monastic illusions and droning soundtrack that opened the show gave reference to the Middle Ages - that period when empires dissolved, and the dark mists of anarchy spread like poisonous vapors.

 




Contact Us | Subscribe | Visit the fashionlines-lookonline-zoozoom forum | Fashionlines Archives | “Jewels By Christine”

© 1998-2005 Fashionlines.com. All rights reserved.

NARS at Beauty.com