Hold onto your horses. French fashion is back
to its swashbuckling best and the designer leading the charge is a young
mixed-race man determined to give post-attacks Paris a new swagger.
“I want to make all men feel like princes again,” Olivier Rousteing
declared Saturday after his dashing, unashamedly masculine show for
Balmain.
Not since the days of the Charge of the Light Brigade has there been
such
an onrush of braid, breeches and boots.
Rousteing’s models were not the pallid sexless automatons of so many
shows.
Instead, they were dashing hussars and Cossack officers you half expected
would pull cavalry swords from their gorgeous scarlet and leather
cummerbunds
as they thundered through a Parisian mansion.
Half of them looked like they had come straight from the ball the night
before Waterloo in their silk and velvet breeches, with big brass-buttoned
greatcoats thrown on their shoulders, and fur and tassels flying.
“Paris is the City of Light and those lights should continue to shine,”
the
30-year-old designer, a favourite of pop divas Beyonce and Rihanna, told
AFP.
“I want to bring back the dream and beauty that is Paris… and make all
men feel like princes again.
“I want to show the diversity and colours of France and to show that
Paris
has a past, a present and it will have a future,” he added.
Rousteing, who was adopted by his white parents when he was one year old,
said his show was an ode to the racial and cultural diversity of the French
capital.
A symphony orchestra, playing live to a hip-hop soundtrack, provided the
musical tone.
“Mixing Kanye West and Rihanna with a symphony orchestra is my universe.
I
am French in a French fashion house with a couture tradition which also has
a
very international influence. That for me is Paris — it is that
internationalism and the richness of the mixing of cultures.
“This singular eagerness to embrace a diversity of cultures and ideas…
enrages intolerant minds both here and abroad,” he said.
An Internet darling, with 2.1 million Instagram followers, Rousteing
has
become a reference for stars as diverse as Jane Fonda and Nicki Minaj, who
even rapped on the venerable couture brand’s name as sales have soared.
Rousteing’s high-cheekboned good looks, social media savvy and
friendships
with stars such as West and his wife Kim Kardashian has led to him being
called a “selfie-made man” — a joke he appears to delight in.
Earlier in the day there was a similar defiance against giving in to fear
after the November massacres from Dior’s Kris Van Assche.
Although much of his collection was in black, it was not the black of
mourning, he insisted.
“The events mean that we have to be stronger to make people dream. The
darkness is so omnipresent that as a designer who have to go further. You
need
more power and strength,” he told AFP.
“In fact I like the idea of darkness pushing creativity,” he said,
echoing
the sombre luxuriance of Dries Van Noten stand-out line, and fellow Belgian
creator Walter Van Beirendonck, whose show was simply called “Woest”, which
means furious in Flemish.
Paris-based label Etudes — whose studio is near the Bataclan concert
hall
were 90 people died in November’s attacks — seemed almost to be on a war
footing in their Saturday show, with a collection largely comprised of
military-inspired and camouflage outfits, fighter pilot fatigues and
parachute
suits.
There was a similar ready-for-anything air in newcomers OAMC, whose
nifty
high-end functional streetwear is also created only a few blocks away and is
replete with the spirit of Parisian resistance.
But if you were looking for a sign that “Paris will always be Paris”,
look
no further than the Hermes show on Saturday night. All the elements of
ineffable casual French style were there, the discreet charm of the
bourgeoisie personified.
Only that dried-blood red, a colour that crops up across the collections
like a wound, would lead you to believe that anything untoward had
happened. (AFP)