Paris Fashion, Then and Now

Any online editor that has covered Paris fashion most likely bears the bruises to prove it. Certain French houses have long been resistant to the idea of the Internet, preferring old-fashioned glossy magazines as the singular means of conveying glamour. To this day, one venerable label (formerly a saddle maker) will not allow .coms to cover catwalk shows.

But to look at the whole of the picture is to see that times are slowly changing, even in France, where the old saying “if you can’t beat them, join them” has gradually filtered down. The French have come to embrace technology, even if they’ve not quite mastered e-mail.

One of my most cherished memories is the evening I spent explaining the marvels of the web to octogenarian Pierre Cardin. He had arrived at the Carousel du Louvre to lend support for a new crop of fashion designers about to compete for the St. Roch award, and remembering that I worked for an online publication, he had questions. “You’re still faithful to the Internet aren’t you?”, he quizzed. “Now remind me how is it you get the thing to work?”

Change comes, sometimes slowly, sometimes with the speed of an IM, but that’s what fashion is all about.

Any retrospective of the past seven years would not be complete without mention of the single most influential event to shape the fashion of our times – the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. It was almost as if a dark curtain fell over Paris in the sad days that followed – cafés sat empty, night clubs closed early, hotel rooms went unfilled, even the Eiffel Tower was dimmed. And the global economic devastation that was sat in motion that day eventually wreaked havoc over high fashion. In October of 2001, not one American buyer was to be found at the Paris Ready-to-Wear shows, and the few journalists present were understandably distracted by the military operations underway in Afghanistan, where bombs began to fall even before the last model exited the Comme des Garçons runway.

Fashion Houses went out of business, designers were replaced, a survival mode took hold as a more conservative époque (artistically and financially) was ushered in. Those designers smart enough to see, or even predict change – Raf Simons all but warned the attacks were coming in his July 2001 men’s show – have flourished.

Helmut Lang is gone, Balmain couture is gone, Tom Ford is gone.

Meanwhile Alber Elbaz has excelled.. Raf Simons’ career has been catapulted. Karl Lagerfeld has sparkled.

But it is Hedi Slimane whose words ring true. As he told me after the Dior Homme “Follow Me” show in the summer of 2002: “Everything works in evolution.”

– Timothy Hagy