Thursday5 March 2020 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES 5
As any luxury analyst worth their salt
will tell you, the gulf between fashion’s
conglomerate-backed mega-brands and
the smaller independents has never
been greater. It takes deep pockets to
capture the attention (and wallets) of
Chinese shoppers, who drove 90 per
cent of luxury sales growth last year,
according to Bain.
The divide was all the more apparent
on the final days of Paris Fashion Week,
as labels such as Balenciaga and Louis
Vuitton wowed with big-budget shows
and smaller, independent designers
scrambled to figure out how they would
deliver their spring orders as the spread
of the coronavirus ground factories and
shipments to a halt.
The biggest of those big brands is
Louis Vuitton, which is responsible for
45 per centof parent company LVMH’s
operating profits, per analysts’ esti-
mates. It held its show at the Louvre on
the final evening of Paris Fashion Week,
where access had been largely cordoned
off by armoured police ahead of French
union protests over pension reforms.
Such is the brand’s might that the
chaos caused no delays, and as the lights
dimmed a stage curtain lifted to reveal
200 choral singers standing in a wooden
gallery, outfitted in an array of period
costumes — Elizabethan, Victorian,
the Roaring’20s — designed by
costumier Milena Canonero of film
director Stanley Kubrick’s ClockworkA
Orange ame.f
Women’s artistic director Nicolas
Ghesquière explained they represented
the past; the runway, the “not-so-dis-
tant future” —that is the clothes and
accessories that will appear on shop
floors four to six months from now
(coronavirus delays notwithstanding).
It was an impressive affair, and the
audience — which included actors Alicia
Vikander, Lupita Nyong’o and Léa
Seydoux — applauded before the first
models even stepped out. They were
outfitted in parachute bombers and
pinstripe trousers, motocross dresses
and ruffled petticoats, matador jackets
and foamyVelcro trainers — a synthetic
fusion of old and new, raditional andt
high-tech, all of it live-streamed to audi-
ences around the globe.
It concluded a week of powerful, and
expensive, displays of brand muscle —
Balenciaga’s hi-fi apocalypse; Dior’s
custom-built showspace in the Tuileries
gardens, hung with feminist slogans;
Saint Laurent’s mirrored box opposite
The chasm between the
big brands and the small
independents has rarely
been more stark
might not otherwise have had. Alexan-
der McQueen is one of parent company
Kering’s fastest-growing brands, and it
can afford to splash out on a big set but
didn’t, instead letting its opulent tailor-
ing andheart-painted dresses do the
talking. Stella McCartney reinforced her
brand values lightly and with humour,
installing costumed animals at the
entrance to her show, who handed out
tree saplings as part of a carbon-
reduction scheme (and later joined
models, outfitted in boxy coats and
slouchy tailoring, on the catwalk).
Miu Miu transported its guests to the
Art Deco-era via pink lights and mir-
rored walls, where Miuccia Prada made
a strong case for crushed silk dresses
and the return of the skirt suit.
And then there was Kanye West, who
too is backed by a conglomerate
(Adidas) but with his celebrity, he
hardly requires one. He parachuted into
Paris Fashion Week on Sunday with a
9am performance with hisSunday
Service gospel choir, followed by a 10pm
show the next evening.
It’s been eight years since West last
showed in Paris, then with a designer
label under his own name, which closed
after two seasons of devastating
reviews. This time he showed the eighth
collection for his Yeezy x Adidas label —
an assortment of earthy tonal separates
and padded boots that looked as if
they’d been transported from theStarWars ostume facility — accompanied byc
a debut rap performance from his six-
year-old daughter, North West.
Those who thought West might have
returned to Paris humbled by his
previous experiences were disap-
pointed. In a preview, he spoke of how
influential his Yeezy colour palettes
have been (which is true), and called his
350 trainer “the most iconic shoe in the
past 15 years” (which is debatable).
“You’ll see the shapes [in this collec-
tion] start to influence other designers,”
he added, without irony.
Money, storytelling, good clothes —
sometimes all you need to stand out at
Paris Fashion Week is a little bravado.Go big or go home
the Eiffel Tower (an excellent backdrop
for latex). One wondered how smaller
brands could possibly break through.
Even the most basic of Paris shows can
cost between £80,000-£100,000 to
produce, which doesn’t include the
substantial costs of the collection itself,
one designer told me.
But some did break through, with
strong storytelling or very good clothes,
and sometimes both, as was the case at
Marine Serre, with her post-apocalyptic
clothes and show setting; first-timer
Kenneth Ize, whose striking asa-okefabrics and easy tailoring were unlike
anything else shown at Paris Fashion
Week; and Sacai’s Chitose Abe, whose
Tokyo-based label is now more than 20
years old but whose deft mixing of
tailoring, sportswear and fluid silk
continues to compel. (She will make her
haute couture ebut in July as a guestd
designer for the Jean Paul Gaultier
label.) Rokh’sRok Hwang, now in his
third Paris season, wrote in a show note
that he was missing his sister’s wedding
that day, and dedicated his collection to
her. It gave the clothes a poignancy theyClockwise from top left: Louis Vuitton AW20; Stella McCartney; Alexander McQueen; Rokh; Louis Vuitton; Balenciaga; Miu Miu; Sacai Jason Lloyd-Evans—Without Karl, can Chanel find its voice?
Once the talk of Paris
Fashion Week, the French
luxury house now speaks
only in whispers
It was just one year ago that Karl
Lagerfeld’sfinal collection or Chanelf
was shown at the Grand Palais, 14 days
after his passing. The air was thick,
then, with the sense of the historical
moment — Lagerfeld had been Chanel’s
creativetour de force or 36 years — andf
models and clients marvelled or wept as
they wandered through the snowy
alpine village he had dreamt up for
his last bow.
A year later, much at Chanel remains
the same, though it speaks more quietly
than it used to. Instead of bringing in a
well-known outsider, Chanel promoted
his longtime right-hand, Virginie Viard,
coats, boxy wool jackets with scalloped
edges, and roomy jodhpurs left
unbuttoned over, or tucked into, swash-
buckling boots.
They, and the waistless black velvet
dresses, looked comfortable and easy
after a week of sharp waists and skin-
t i g h t l a t e x — a n e f f e c t m i r e d
by the cheap-looking medallion neck-
laces, heavy cross brooches and chain
belts piled on top.
Missing was a theme, a narrative, a
crackle of excitement. Chanel’s shows
are often the most talked-about of fash-
ion week, fetching front-page headlines
and generating hundreds of millions of
page views for online publishers.
Chanel is the world’s second-largest
luxury brand behind Louis Vuitton,
with 2018 revenues of $11.1bn, an
increase of 10.5 per cent compared with
the previous year. Such growth will be
difficult to sustain if Viard doesn’t learn
to speak up.who has given few interviews. Those she
has given have been devoid of the spark
and controversy that would keep Lager-
feld’s name in the headlines for weeks.
The show sets are also simpler, less
costly, absent of the rockets or life-sized
supermarchés of the Lagerfeld years.
Instead,yesterday’s show featured a
plain mirrored catwalk, lightly misted,
which wound between white-and-black
risers stacked like Chanel hat boxes.
Models stepped out, sometimes in twos
or threes, outfitted in slim A-line tweedFASHION
Lauren
IndvikPA R I S FA S H I O N W E E K
The show sets are also
simpler... absent of
the rockets or life-
sized supermarchés of
the Lagerfeld years
Even the most basic of
Paris shows can cost
between £80,000-
£100,000 to produce
MARCH 5 2020 Section:Features Time: 3/20204/ - 18:21 User:andrew.higton Page Name:FASHION, Part,Page,Edition:USA , 5, 1