Paris Fashion Week SS'13: Saint Laurent

Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2012 Backstage Film

The amount of work that happens backstage before a fashion show is staggering, but it’s often hard to get a sense of that in what seems like disorganized chaos. This new film by Sean Frank gives you an intimate look at the scene backstage at the McQueen spring 2012 show as Sarah Burton and her team put the finishing touches on the models and garments. A lot of fashion films pass through our laptops, but this one sort of gave us the chills.

The sheer amount of intricate detail in this show, from the head pieces to the hair braiding to the manicures, is impressive. Getting to see the small details up close and then at the end as the final product walks the runway is a revelation, and a reminder of why I love fashion in the first place.

PFW Spring/Summer 2012: Chanel

For today's Chanel spectacular, Karl Lagerfeld recast himself as Prospero, conjuring a magical underwater world from the raw stuff of fashion. The Grand Palais was transformed by huge, blinding white sea shapes—corals, shells, sea horses, stingrays—and Florence Welch arose like Botticelli's Venus on the half shell to sing "What the Water Gave Me." It was a bravura performance all around.

What the water gave Karl was the kind of acute overview that only he could turn into a dazzling collection. He'd been musing on the fact that forms as modern as anything designed by the architect Zaha Hadid have been shaped at the bottom of the ocean by natural processes taking millions of years. Chanel hasn't been in existence for quite that long, but there was an impressive, graphic modernity shaped by lengthy natural processes (Karl's thoughts) in most of the 80 or so outfits that strolled around today's massive set. Lagerfeld said he wanted lightness. He'd used new fabrics even he didn't know how to define. They brought an iridescent mother-of-pearl shimmer to the collection—the lightness literally shone through. That was also why Lagerfeld strung pearls, instead of belts, around waists. And Sam McKnight dotted pearls through the models' slicked-back hair, too.

PFW Spring/Summer 2012: Louis Vuitton

The carousel that team Louis Vuitton set up in the Louvre's Cour Carrée was echt Marc Jacobs. The designer has made an art form of the fashion 180. Last season's fetish-y rubber boots sold 2,000 pairs in the first week they were available, Jacobs reported, but he was ready for a change nonetheless. "After the hardness of Fall, we wanted something gentle and kind, fragile but strong, too," he said, touting the workmanship that went into not only the clothes but also the bags. Matte crocodile coats painstakingly hand-pieced together so that the scales match; an eggshell lacquer bag made with the assistance of the last man in Paris still in command of the 1920's technique. That sort of devotion to craft would come in handy were Jacobs to land the top design spot at Christian Dior and the couture atelier that comes with it. No?


                                           

PFW Spring/Summer 2012: Alexander McQueen

LONG LIVE MCQUEEN!!!!
*I'm still breathless.....i think Sarah Burton is my hero!*

PFW Spring/Summer 2012: Yves Saint Laurent

The shoes! The shoes! Front-rowers Kylie Minogue and Elettra Wiedemann could barely tear their eyes away from the footwear during the Yves Saint Laurent show today. Paradisiacal for the shoe guy, problematic for the clothing guy. Although maybe the haute bourgeois collection that Stefano Pilati delivered was designed to emphasize fetishistic extremes. In its allegiance to YSL's classic codes, the one it cleaved to tightest was Belle de Jour, the bon chic, bon genre babe with the dark side. It was all there in the sepulchral color palette, in the couture volumes, in the restraint and release of scarf tops and kicky little godet skirts. The painted lips and hair held tight by a half-moon of Barbary gold took the message and ran with it.

PFW Spring/Summer 2012: Kanye Debuts In Paris, Gets Slammed By Critics Already

Kanye West showed his debut collection tonight in Paris. The show was easily one of the most buzzed about of the week and he wrangled an impressive front row, with designers outweighing celebrities. Based on reports from Twitter and Eric Wilson’s just-postedwrite-up on the Times‘ blog On the Runway, Azzedine Alaïa, Joseph Altuzarra, Alexander Wang, Olivier Theyskens, Dean and Dan Caten, Jeremy Scott and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were all there. The right editors were there too: 

Anna Wintour, Carine Roitfeld, Glenda Bailey and Anna Dello Russo. As for the celebrities who showed? La Lohan was there, as we reported, and so was Ciara, but sadly Beyonce and Jay-Z were no-shows. Or maybe, not so sadly, considering the show was slammed by critics almost as soon as the first model hit the runway.

We’ll have our review posted tomorrow morning (our fabulous contributor, Flaunt’sLong Nguyen, was one of the lucky 100 granted a ticket). Until then, here’s what the critics had to say about it over Twitter. Warning, it’s not pretty.

PFW Spring/Summer 2012: Kanye West

Kanye West said he found taking a bow at the end of his first fashion show in front of a few hundred industry professionals much more daunting than encoring in front of thousands, as he usually does. No surprise there. West's genius as a groundbreaking musician is unquestionable, whereas his status in the fashion world has been, until now, that of an ardent-bordering-on-obsessive fan. Which was clear from his genuine delight when Silvia Venturini Fendi and her daughter Delfina Delettrez Fendi came backstage to congratulate him after the show.

They were two of a surprising number of designers who turned out for Kanye: The presence of Azzedine Alaïa, Dean and Dan Caten, Olivier Theyskens, Jeremy Scott, and the Olsens sealed this evening's deal as a fashion event. Equally, they underscored the goodwill he had going into this. And Kanye himself was poignantly aware of the challenge. "The biggest hurdle I had to face is the celebrity designer or the hip-hop designer concept," he said backstage. But he had some major help in battling preconceptions. Among the people he bounced ideas off, he name-checked Kim Jones, Louise Goldin, Katie Eary, and Louise Wilson, the guiding light of Central Saint Martins and, by extension, guru of British fashion.