Fashion Trends & Tours in Italy

The New York Times fashion writer Jean Luce Huré says about Paris Fashion Week “a good place to say that she is promoting a false assumption, namely that the couture collections are tailor-made for the red carpet“.
“…Actually, the couture collections are tailor-made for about 500 people in the world who have the means or the connections to get an $80,000 dress, and the rest is just ballyhoo to sell the cheaper commercial stuff.”

Haute couture is a different game. Not only do you need piles of money, but you have to able to project yourself into a candy-pink pencil suit with what looks like a Japanese origami bird coming off the back.

- About the collections -

This has been a season of the salon, with Mr. Galliano literally evoking the dove gray atmosphere of Dior, and Karl Lagerfeld opening the Chanel show by rolling out a cream-colored carpet and ending the presentation with the staff of the house, including the heads, or premières, of the workrooms, seated class-portrait-style opposite the audience.

In a collection that was easily his best for Dior, and certainly his most coherent, Mr. Galliano did not spare Paris embroiderers, who gave him dragonflies and tiny, three-dimension birds, or his fabric suppliers, who made him gazar and organdy in dense triple weights, or his seamstresses and tailors, who stitched, pleated and pressed the origami folds so that they were immaculate and perfectly integrated into the whole outfit.
But what you mainly felt about Mr. Galliano’s work this season was how original the colors were: the sugary pinks, the lime and sea-foam greens, the shades of brown darkening to black on a long dress formed by ribbon strips of fabric that had been inspired by Japanese baskets.

Mr. Lagerfeld imparted a vertical line in other ways: with a jacket made entirely from handmade strips of tweed braid; with dresses that had sheer bodies ribbed with piped organdy or tulle, and a beautiful two-piece leopard-print silk dress traced at the hem in silver embroidery.

Valentino, in his 45th year in fashion, delivered a superb collection, opening with a floaty ivory satin jacket and matching cutout skirt. Everything about the clothes, loosely inspired by a show he did in 1968, suggested lightness, from the dominance of white to the youthful volumes and cloudlike coats. Valentino frustrates when he piles things on — the lips too red, the gowns too embellished.

Giorgio Armani. This was a deft collection, though not just because it involved more Parisian heft than we’ve seen from Mr. Armani. It worked because he had something new to say in the cut, clearly conveyed by a simple dress in beige micro-check silk with a narrow, elongated waist and an exaggerated shoulder. The same line appeared in jackets.

(source NYT)  (Pitcure via WP)