Lanvin (Q1807)
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French multinational high fashion house
- Jeanne Lanvin S.A.
- Jeanne Lanvin SA
- House of Lanvin
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Lanvin |
French multinational high fashion house |
|
Statements
senior menswear designer
couture design assistant
designer
2024
artistic director
designer
1909
founder
Amid the upheaval in Paris these days is a quiet gathering of speed at the oldest continuously operating couture house in the world.Today, Lanvin will unveil its latest store, inside the bustling Galeries Lafayette flagship here. The move, which brings the house its third boutique in the French capital, follows last month’s opening of a store on the Croisette in Cannes (just in time for the Film Festival) and not far from the original address Jeanne Lanvin chose a century ago.In the days ahead, the house will—finally!—announce the name of its new artistic director. But despite the headrush of a new appointment, it’s worth remembering that the new Lanvin’s next phase is a culmination of two-and-a-half years of careful reframing and rebuilding by deputy managing director Siddhartha Shukla and his team. Judging by the buzziness in the showroom, something is afoot.“It’s not an overnight thing, but growth is as strong as it’s been in a decade and I believe in the talent of the studio,” Shukla offered during a preview of the new collection. The imminent arrival of a (seasoned) new figurehead, he added, portends not a revolution but rather a re-situating of the maison as a go-to for what made it famous in the first place: le chic ultime.Suffice to say there’s nary a t-shirt or hoodie in sight. But that doesn’t mean Lanvin is hewing solely to its turf of cocktail and evening wear, though that category remains its strength.Dance—specifically icons like Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Pina Bausch—inspired cape dresses like a black number torqued and draped at the back hem, another that managed to fuse flou and body-con, and a sage green draped number that looked on-point without giving much away. An embellished silk cady dress dotted with silver starbursts of “Traviata” embroidery picked up on a house motif from the 1920s. A dress with a “flou twist,”anchored by a fluted silver bijou that referenced the bottle of Lanvin’s most famous scent, Arpège (designed by Lanvin herself), was a fine exercise in one-and-done. A daffodil gown with strass-embroidered straps looked like a potential red carpet workhorse; not shown here are other pieces from the Edition Soir evening wear that rise to demi-couture level.That said, daywear, for both genders, is a priority because, as Shukla points out, “the reality is that people don’t wear evening dresses all day.
” Au contraire, as anyone who has meandered through the streets of any major world capital (even Paris) or boarded a plane lately knows all too well.The “spirit of flou” took shape for example in a lightweight, graceful pantsuit in wool with a drawstring-waisted jacket and deep-cuffed trousers, paired with a crisp leather bucket bag with a swingy, jewel-like keychain. For men, flou might mean a deconstructed jacket. A couple of linen bombers, one with a cocoon shape, looked strong, as did a polo-style “not-sweatshirt.” Trenches in particular looked well-cut, and this season came in double-face salt and pepper cotton-wool mouliné. Very wisely, the brand has foregone conspicuous branding in favor of a squared signifier, variously at the end of a drawstring, on a back belt loop, and elsewhere.In all, it looked like the studio has been working hard and the groundwork is laid. But ultimate, “radical” chic never comes without a dash of daring, a little sass, and a knowing wink. Here’s hoping the new steward—whomever it may be—can throw all that into the mix. If so, then Lanvin will really land back on the map.
10 June 2024
Any minute now, the house of Lanvin will reveal a new creative director. By rights, this pre-fall 2024 collection should be not just a last palate cleanser; it should also usher in a renaissance for a house that has been on one wild ride since Alber Elbaz was regrettably ousted eight years ago.For the past two years, deputy general manager Siddhartha Shukla—a product guy par excellence who rose through the ranks at Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Theory—has been rethinking merchandising and delving into what Jeanne Lanvin stood for as a proto-feminist, a multihyphenate across creative spheres, and a single mother who in 1889 founded her own company, still the oldest continuously operating couture house in the world.“Lanvin cannot be the house that disappeared,” Shukla said during a visit to the showroom near Parc Monceau. “It’s a very different mentality from a big group, but we’re bringing this house back by treating it like a start-up. Jeanne Lanvin was always looking for the ultimate French chic. So what does the modernized version of her recipe look like? We owe her justice on that.”One direction is building up daywear, whether via a café au lait jumpsuit, women’s and men’s tailoring in Japanese dry wool, or a knit dress with a pointillist bent. Another is treating bijoux adornment as an identity statement, notably in a feline element lifted from a Rateau screen (here on a double-face wool peacoat or worked as sculptural handbag handles).Nancy Cunard—writer, heiress, arts patron, social-justice advocate, and all-around iconoclast—provided a through line for riffs on masculine tropes and bohemia, including touchstones like grain de poudre suiting and timeless gowns. The brand appears to be seeking strength in simplicity: An absinthe green napa cape was paired with a pleated shirtdress in silk organza in the same hue (ditto a men’s wool jacket), a delicate openwork knit reprised Art Deco motifs, and a lush fuchsia knit came with matching scarf.“It’s about addressing the things that are important to a Lanvin woman, like waking up in the morning and not putting on a cocktail dress,” Shukla quipped. Sneakers, thankfully, seem like only one of several possible outcomes in a house originally conceived to hold any kind of product. Where it goes next will be one of the most closely watched stories of the season.
11 December 2023
“After several years of, let’s say, dynamism and even volatility in the brand, we’re really preparing it for the future,” is how CEO Siddhartha Shukla put it at this morning’s Lanvin presentation. By the future he didn’t meanthatFuture: nonetheless the musician’s capsule collection under the house’s new Lanvin Lab format (a multidisciplinary collaboration engine) was available to see (but strictly not to photograph) before its launch in November. This was so hot that a Parisian fire-safety officer was in constant attendance.Today, though, was about the main line, which, like the most recent resort outing, was fashioned by those who remain in the Lanvin team following the exit of its most recent creative director. Under Shukla’s new three-pronged strategy, that main line—which is also due a new headline designer by Christmas—will take center stage. Flanking it will be Lanvin Lab collabs, announced and dropped episodically, and the extremely important, newly vertical category that is accessories: Semi-detaching these from the fortunes of the main collection certainly seems a wise move.As Karl Lagerfeld once observed of Jeanne Lanvin: “Her image wasn’t as strong as that of Chanel because she was a nice old lady and not a fashion plate.” That enigmatic quality freed the house’s team to shape a tight collection that was rooted in 1920s style despite it being a period when Lanvin’s most contemporaneously revered volumes were themselves slightly out of time. There was some highly impressive chain and pearl detailing that created a wonderful opalescence on fringe-edged or pleat-fronted and cuffed dresses. And there were hints of the medieval (a Lanvin 1.0 motif) in cross-laced and keyhole heart necklines. In the look book, but not on show at the presentation, was a concession to that volume in hotly colored tailoring.A smattering of male looks were less inflected by the 1920s (when the founder apparently became the first couturier in Paris to produce menswear) than a desire to present a 2020s foil to the house’s this-season womenswear. The results included boot-cut pants and low-skirted, wide-collar tailoring (so halfway between then and now) spiced with sometimes-coated guipure detailing and shared styling touches. Lanvin’s recent-ish history and powerful origin story means it remains a wonderful but slightly formless opportunity: At this presentation it continued to take gradual shape.
28 September 2023
The house of Lanvin is in a transitional stage once again. In April of this year, Bruno Sialelli, who oversaw Lanvin’s collections since 2019, departed. Around this time, the company also announced “Lanvin Lab,” which has been described as “an experimental space inviting creative partnerships with proven and rising international talents.” It has since been revealed that the first Lanvin Lab endeavor is with the rapper Future. At London’s Wireless Festival, he wore unreleased all-over logo Lanvin overalls–previewing, possibly, the experiment.Until a new creative director is announced (supposedly this coming fall), Lanvin’s seasonal collections are being spearheaded by its in-house studio. Resort 2024, with womenswear and menswear (menswear is classified here as spring 2024), represents a “restoration of the ultimate chic,” said CEO Siddhartha Shukla. Lanvin is Paris’s longest-operating fashionmaison, and the goal, with the in-between collections, is to reflect this longevity and prestige through an uptick in sophistication while still remaining of-the-moment.The new offering has intricate diamond-lattice knits, slinky little knit tops that look great for evening in their casual but refined insouciance, Fortuny-pleated skirts with inlaid Art Deco flourishes, and languid, lean lines. Glamour is layered in through all-overpailletteembroideries and delicate chainmail wings. The menswear side of things looks more straightforward–well-cut and versatile and offhandedly stylish. It's not a huge stride forward, but it’s not a tentative baby step, either–there’s a feeling of optimism in the air. Call it a confident strut.
12 July 2023
In December last year, the Lanvin Group—controlled by the Chinese conglomerate Fosun–went public. The buildup to the big move saw a consolidation of the brand expressed in a more streamlined proposal for the house. Last season, it materialized in a “full wardrobe” approach to luxury that dialed down the opulent decoration and playful motifs that had characterized creative director Bruno Sialelli’s work. He continued that methodology in a measured Sunday morning show set under the vaulted ceilings of the Collège des Bernardins, a former Cistercian college from the 13th century that now serves as a center for theology.Inspired by his venue, Sialelli watched the 1978 Éric Rohmer filmPerceval le Gallois, a highly stylized medieval knight’s tale with naive drawings for backdrops. In the beginning of his Lanvin career, the result would have unfolded in the childlike creations that embodied his men’s collections, but bar a few boys in knitted jumpsuits, he stuck to a mature language in both silhouette and texture. His muted palette was interrupted only by accents of color in accessories and jewelry. The women’s tailoring manifested in ladylike double-layered blazers and sharp-shouldered jackets and coats he attributed to another film, the Isabelle Adjani–starringPossessionfrom 1981.His men’s tailoring cut a conservative line but was amplified in fabrications like “poodle” mohair and croc-embossed leather, likewise used in the womenswear. Those elements set the tone for a collection that approached the glamour characteristic of Sialelli’s work prior to last summer’s “reset” in texture and surface decoration. They didn’t scream “opulence,” but materials like those faux exotics and fluffy wools, tinseled velvets, sumptuous sequins, and rustling glass beads that adorned cocktail and evening dresses all fell under the category of textures that seduce the senses; things that stimulate that catnip effect of glamour.“[There] is a bit more strength in the direction,” Sialelli said, comparing this collection to his last. “I think it expresses very well what place Lanvin takes in our landscape, in the eveningwear, in the tailoring, in the embellishment, in the emotion of the fabrics.” Sometimes it felt a little bit like some of these creations—such as the magnified, super-relaxed robes de style adaptations that closed the show—were dying to erupt into more extravagant versions of themselves.
But the newly toned-down brand delivered plenty of viable and elegant wardrobe pieces to take its wearer from day to evening, as Sialelli set out to do with his Lanvin 2.0.
5 March 2023
This summer, Lanvin announced a “reset” focused on aligning its directions for women’s and menswear, and building a contemporary wardrobe for both customers. In the process, the house wants to turn down the volume on the opulence it had been amplifying in recent seasons, and settle for a more subdued glamour. That was illustrated in a pre-collection “overseen” by artistic director Bruno Sialelli in July, but today’s main collection felt more like his definitive—and more personal—proposal for Lanvin’s new market plan. “In the past, we introduced my vision for daywear. Then, we introduced the eveningwear. Now we want to express the idea that we can accompany our audience on a full-day occasion,” he said in a preview.There were two sides to the collection Sialelli showed in L’Atelier des Lumières, a former foundry on Rue Saint-Maur, the walls of which he bathed in projections of poetic footage created by the film-maker Joshua Woods. On the narrative side, we were on holiday somewhere between the desert of Marrakech and the coast of Casablanca: yellow and blue coats and miniskirts constructed in shiny eel skin, seaweed-shaped embroideries on jackets, and knitted robes de style that bounced like jellyfish. On the technical side, we were between the pristine and the deconstructed: pristine coats, shorts and mini-skirts frayed at the hems, macramé tops meticulously but coarsely handcrafted in silk tubing, crispy cotton dresses, and stone-washed satin coats that played to the same contrast.Transparent cloqué coats and suits and some of the more prettified robes de style considered, “subdued” would probably be overstating the evolution. But Sialelli did clarify his proposition. Gone were the animated prints, wild art deco ornamentations, and ballroom gestures of previous seasons. In their place, he turned to an earthy palette energized with hits of electric blue and orange, and materials—such as those eel coats, or the plumage that adorned path-clearing ballerinas—that were naturally graphic rather than artificially or animatedly so. Amongst the more complex proposals were some nice options for luxurious tailoring: clean enough to be timeless and sculpted enough to push past pre-collection territory.
4 October 2022
Lanvin is restructuring its direction. Starting with the pre-collection you see in these pictures, the house is rethinking its strategy for products across categories and building a comprehensive wardrobe for the contemporary woman and man. That sort of marketing jargon isn’t what you’d expect from a designer, and sure enough, Creative Director Bruno Sialelli wasn’t present during an appointment in Paris the morning after the men’s shows. “He’s still very much part of this reset and aligned with the creative approach,” the brand’s Deputy General Manager Siddhartha Shukla explained. The pre-collection— which reflects the direction Sialelli will expand on going forward— was designed by the Lanvin studio.During his time at Lanvin, Sialelli—who joined the house in early 2019—has gradually built a hyper-glamorous expression founded in the Art Deco codes of Jeanne Lanvin. If his cocktail-centric womenswear has catered to a segment of established and (newly) rich ladies, his whimsical but sexy menswear has perhaps appealed more to their sons. This pre-collection suggests that Lanvin will align its men’s and women’s wardrobes in both age and audience going forward. The key word here is “radical chic,” said Shukla: a subdued approach to glamour, that aims to gently express the gilded animation of Jeanne Lanvin through functional adornment such as buttons and clasps, which is also a way of creating signifiers that aren’t logos.Notably, this collection hadn’t been designed with Lanvin’s archive silhouettes in mind—except for some takes on the charmeuse—but from new ideas of shapes and cuts. On the women’s side, this quieter Lanvin materialized in daywear that maintained a considered balance between dressed-up and dressed-down: an unstructured and totally relaxed pleated duck egg charmeuse dress, a sporty red cashmere sweater dress with a deconstructed angular back, and a white inside-out, fluffy fil-coupé dress. A tweed coat and a camel trapeze coat had a timeless sense of chic about them, and obviously, slimline tuxedos in grain de poudre oozed luxury. When it came to fulfilling the market categories, a daisy print pajama top with a matching relaxed skirt and a technical jersey tracksuit made it into the offering.The almost minimalist new approach painted something of a contrast to previous collections.
It was reflected in the men’s department, which had been stripped of its cute, romantic sex appeal save for the fat-laced chunky trainers that continue to be a bestseller. The new Lanvin man felt more similar to that of Lukas Ossendrijver’s tenure: formal and sophisticated, with a twist. He wore double-face cashmere overcoats, mohair suits with hidden elastic waistbands in slim, classic, or oversize cuts, and banker-style monk shoes. Like the womenswear, it was all very tasteful and hard to fault. Come September’s co-ed runway show, it will be interesting to see how Sialelli interprets this new, less eccentric direction.
29 June 2022
Art Deco and the interwar period have, ominously, been recurring motifs this season. The high-octane glamour that flourished in the face of impending gloom a hundred years ago resonates with a new post-pandemic era where history seems to be echoing itself. Jeanne Lanvin lived and worked in that time, and the archives Bruno Sialelli currently consults as her house’s present-day custodian strongly embody the now-or-never appetite for opulence inherent of that time.“We were already into that way of thinking with COVID, and it’s continuing to be—let’s say—hard and scary,” he said during a collection viewing on the morning of its filmic release. “There’s something about these moments of interwar that feels worrying but optimistic at the same time, but these are times when creativity and culture should raise their proposals as a kind of remedy for these concerns.”With that in mind, Sialelli captured his collection in a suspenseful film-noir-type runway video with a thrilling electronic soundtrack by Yasmina Dexter. He fashioned what he called “a past-to-present silhouette” in pantsuits transformed into formal coatdresses and jumpsuits—some with dramatically padded shoulders—and outfits composed of coats, blouses, and trousers, which somehow had the same feeling as an old-world cocktail dress, just condensed and contemporized.Patterns created by intricate jacquard and allover beading brought the Art Deco to the ball in a big way, along with layered disk embellishments lifted from the archives of Jeanne Lanvin. “I love time patterns. I love inspecting that idea. Jeanne Lanvin was obsessed with Egypt. We have an image of her on a camel in front of the Cheops pyramid,” Sialelli said. Kept intact since the day she left it, the founder’s office is a time capsule of everything that inspired her, including the many scrapbooks she created on her travels. In her Egyptian adventures—a hot spot for the Art Deco set—Sialelli detected an air of sci-fi that felt quite now.“From Cecil B. DeMille to sci-fi movies likeDuneorStargate, there’s something in Egypt that feels so graphic and modern and futuristic,” he said. Denis Villeneuve’s interpretation ofDunefrom last year has imprinted itself on a lot of designer minds this season, and its ancient-futuristic scenography and costume design were detectable across Sialelli’s silhouettes, surface decoration, and the sphinx prints he emblazoned on tops.
For all his sumptuous adornment, girlified robes de style, and “carnal flower” ruffles on dresses, his time travels—and the parallels he identified—were most compelling when the devil was in the detail.Cases in point: the aforementioned jumpsuits, which served a contemporary reduction of glamour dressing rather than an intensification of the same idea; a men’s overcoat that looked perfectly classic from the front but had been infused with the memory of a bustier on the back, elegantly built into its structure; or another men’s overcoat in beige jersey with gold crushed velvet side and sleeve panels that created an optical illusion, opulent yet controlled.
5 March 2022
Because the Art Deco archives Bruno Sialelli is tackling at Lanvin are already an acquired taste, he is left with two options: Do you go the polite way, use it sparingly and open the door to a bigger potential audience? Or, do you go all in, amplify it, and secure yourself a perhaps smaller but more die-hard clientele? It would seem Sialelli has chosen the latter. The glamour-positivity that’s been embedded in his recent collections is now as full glitz as that customer could want: gilded embellishment, baby robe de style numbers, and cocktail dresses studded like skyscrapers.“Most of the dresses we sold lately were the strongest ones, like Bella [Hadid]’s Lurex dress from the campaign,” Sialelli explained during a collection preview in his Paris showroom. “Most of the customers that come to us are coming to get supported by glamorous, fabulous products. They search for an elevated and more confident version of themselves.” Those facts encouraged him to push the envelope further. In what he called a “bold and joyful and free and unapologetic” proposition, the designer explored Pop-Arty daisy prints, dense tinselling, and motifs from 1940s Batman comics.If it sounds like a jarring mix, it was. High-octane glamour has always walked a fine line between good taste and bad, and the collection’s clash between Batman-adorned metallic gazar dresses, so shiny they looked wet, and tinselled skirt suits was subversive to say the least. Talking about his vision for the collection, Sialelli referenced the way animated worlds freely mix styles and cultures. “Like a dream village inPinocchiomade up of a Bavarian church and an English house, and all this is mixed and looks new. I love that idea, and I love the way it’s applied inBatman.”The superhero entered the picture courtesy of Tim Burton’s 1992 masterpieceBatman Returns, which Sialelli loved growing up. “The styling of the Art Deco through the lens of the movie was very interesting to us, because fashion is about creating dreams informed by many references that you relate very freely,” he said. After the pandemic, we all need a hero, but wearing him on a cocktail dress might be a curious move, even for Lanvin’s top-tier glamazons. The reference was most successfully translated into the shapes of Sialelli’s menswear, which is often more suited to the childlike whims that have previously made for great motifs in his work.
In this case, the broad-shouldered silhouette of the Batman universe drew a Tamara de Lempicka–esque line, which made Sialelli’s Lanvin man feel a little more mature. That feeling was echoed in two beautifully cut trench coats, which hung off the body almost like evening dresses. If Naomi Campbell has her own Bat-Signal lighting up the skies, someone summoned her last night: The supermodel closed the show, wafting through the Salle Pleyel in billowing black chiffon like the Caped Crusader.
3 October 2021
Any kid who spent afternoons around the millennium watching MTV will know that the girl group All Saints is the catnip of a generation. Once its members started harmonizing, your heart melted, and it still does. Add a young Leonardo DiCaprio to the mix and the effect is positively euphoric. Bruno Sialelli pushed all those nostalgic buttons with his second music-video-style short film for Lanvin, which followed February’s re-imagining of Gwen Stefani’s “Rich Girl” from the same era. And he wasn’t even trying to hide his tricks.“Being a teenager, with all your hormones, seeing things through the lenses of blossoming and being ‘in-between,’The Beachwas something very emotionally engaging,” he recalled over coffee in his opulent Paris showroom, referring to Danny Boyle’s DiCaprio-starring film from the year 2000. Its soundtrack featured All Saints’s elating “Pure Shores,” which also served as Sialelli’s score. “Their music catches you by the collar. It brings you back to your teenage life and the beginning of your sexuality. That was the manipulation we wanted to bring.”A pretty straightforward affair, Sialelli’s short film riffed on Boyle’s appetizing MTV-worthy camera work and the sizzling, sexual gap-year exoticism ofThe Beachin a way those who know would know. “It’s an aesthetic and field that attracts me, being 33 years old. We thought it would be interesting to give that dimension to a collection,” he said, noting how the tactility, trippiness, and stolen kisses of the film felt almost radical in a post-pandemic climate. “But being, sort of, politically correct.”If the mood was mischievous, it matched the collection. Saturated evening florals gave a certain decadence to short-sleeved day shirts and negligees, or plissé dresses, which had a second-hand sensibility about them that was echoed in little frilly bouclé suits and oversized khaki suits. Graphic skin-tight bodysuits and sci-fi slides cemented the idea of a traveler’s wardrobe: a co-ed melange of things picked up in diverse locations and mixed with a generous generational dose of sportswear.Speaking of generational, Sialelli answered the increasing social media-driven appetite for branded clothes by reissuing Lanvin’s JL monogram from the early 1970s, which kind of looks like an Art Deco skyscraper. Designed by Jules-François Crahay, whose creations informed other pieces in the collection, it had been tweaked and colored for added trompe l’oeil and splashed across sportswear and bags.
Sialelli, who isn’t normally one for a loud logo, smiled: “It gives this vibe of jet-setting…but with us, it’s never first-degree.” Whether you’re the type to fall head-over-heels for nostalgia or for logomania, the bait that Sialelli puts out is effective.
23 June 2021
Any kid who spent afternoons around the millennium watching MTV will know that the girl group All Saints is the catnip of a generation. Once its members started harmonizing, your heart melted, and it still does. Add a young Leonardo DiCaprio to the mix and the effect is positively euphoric. Bruno Sialelli pushed all those nostalgic buttons with his second music-video-style short film for Lanvin, which followed February’s re-imagining of Gwen Stefani’s “Rich Girl” from the same era. And he wasn’t even trying to hide his tricks.“Being a teenager, with all your hormones, seeing things through the lenses of blossoming and being ‘in-between,’The Beachwas something very emotionally engaging,” he recalled over coffee in his opulent Paris showroom, referring to Danny Boyle’s DiCaprio-starring film from the year 2000. Its soundtrack featured All Saints’s elating “Pure Shores,” which also served as Sialelli’s score. “Their music catches you by the collar. It brings you back to your teenage life and the beginning of your sexuality. That was the manipulation we wanted to bring.”A pretty straightforward affair, Sialelli’s short film riffed on Boyle’s appetizing MTV-worthy camera work and the sizzling, sexual gap-year exoticism ofThe Beachin a way those who know would know. “It’s an aesthetic and field that attracts me, being 33 years old. We thought it would be interesting to give that dimension to a collection,” he said, noting how the tactility, trippiness, and stolen kisses of the film felt almost radical in a post-pandemic climate. “But being, sort of, politically correct.”If the mood was mischievous, it matched the collection. Saturated evening florals gave a certain decadence to short-sleeved day shirts and negligees, or plissé dresses, which had a second-hand sensibility about them that was echoed in little frilly bouclé suits and oversized khaki suits. Graphic skin-tight bodysuits and sci-fi slides cemented the idea of a traveler’s wardrobe: a co-ed melange of things picked up in diverse locations and mixed with a generous generational dose of sportswear.Speaking of generational, Sialelli answered the increasing social media-driven appetite for branded clothes by reissuing Lanvin’s JL monogram from the early 1970s, which kind of looks like an Art Deco skyscraper. Designed by Jules-François Crahay, whose creations informed other pieces in the collection, it had been tweaked and colored for added trompe l’oeil and splashed across sportswear and bags.
Sialelli, who isn’t normally one for a loud logo, smiled: “It gives this vibe of jet-setting…but with us, it’s never first-degree.” Whether you’re the type to fall head-over-heels for nostalgia or for logomania, the bait that Sialelli puts out is effective.
22 June 2021
Unapologetic glamour is almost controversial in the current climate. “It feels radical,” said Bruno Sialelli. “Going into a fabulous hotel and dressing up and having a party with friends was something so normal not long ago. Now, you feel challenged by it.” That was the innocent—but loaded—scene that played out in his Lanvin film, shot as a sort of alternate lockdown music video for Gwen Stefani’sRich Girl,with a real cameo by Eve. In it, a group of young people bring their extensive Lanvin shopping spree back to the Shangri-La Hotel in Paris, dress up, and have the kind of ball that hasn’t been put on a pedestal like this since pre-pandemic times, or perhaps before the recession.For millennials like Sialelli, who graduated college during the financial crisis and went into adult life with anti-excess fingers hovering above our heads, such displays of glamour are inseparably tied to the early 2000s: the old world, where Stefani and the rest of us proudly dreamed of having “all the money in the world” to “clean out Vivienne Westwood in my Galliano gown.” Sialelli grew up in the South of France with MTV as his window to the world. “My understanding of fashion was very linked to singers and actors I had been watching,” he explained on a video call from Paris. “Now, in my 30s, I’m fascinated with that period of my life, because whatever you’ve been fed as kid will follow you for the rest of your life. This collection is very personal to me.”
8 March 2021
As far as fashion is concerned, there’s beautiful irony to the fact that China was the first country to return to a sense of normalcy after the coronavirus outbreak. Pre-pandemic, China was the new shopping center of the world. Post-pandemic, staging your fashion show there is pretty much a win-win scenario. “We can do a proper event there with hundreds of people,” Bruno Sialelli said during a preview in Paris, two weeks before he shipped his pre-styled Lanvin show to Shanghai and live-streamed it from the historic Yu Garden. “And to be very pragmatic, this is the market that is going to drive growth in luxury in general. It’s good for us to federate our community there.”Lanvin is owned by Fosun International, the Chinese conglomerate with such eclectic subsidiaries as the Wolverhampton Wanderers and Cirque du Soleil. Suffice to say Sialelli’s bosses are not dull. In fact, the kooky universe they’re giving him the freedom to build at Lanvin is starting to feel a lot like the early beginnings of Alessandro Michele’s multidimensional (and very lucrative) Gucci. For his Paris previews, Sialelli had taken out the former home of the chocolate baron Henri Menier, anhôtel particulierso odd and ornate it felt like walking into a gingerbread house.He embellished it with the gilded Art Deco knickknacks with which he’s now furnishing his vision for Lanvin: little brass cases with goldfish motifs, shoes fitted with golden ball-shaped heels borrowed from the house’s perfume bottle stoppers, and chintzy jewelry you could mistake forobjets d’art. While Sialelli cracked the code to his Lanvin menswear early in his nearly two-year tenure (whimsical 1970s cartoon princes at sea, shall we say) it wasn’t until last season that his womenswear found its voice: cinematic ladylike elegance suspended between Hollywood glamour and Parisian confection, in thorough reverence of Jeanne Lanvin.If earlier proposals looked more like Sialelli’s former job at Loewe, now, it seems the spirit of the founder has entirely possessed him. “In a way, yes!” he said.And some: Her Art Deco heritage seeped through every inch of this collection, from those golden trinkets to the reimagined Jean Dunand motifs that graced garments and accessories, and the Armand-Albert Rateau pieces and Georges Lepape illustrations that inspired them. The show opened with Sialelli’s interpretations of Jeanne Lanvin’srobe de style, the dainty drop-waist silhouette she loosely revived from the 19th century.
The first—black with a crystal bow across the hip—was virtually a replica of its 1920s embodiment.
18 October 2020
A rural postman named Ferdinand Cheval spent 33 years building the incredible backdrop of this season’s Lanvin lookbook and film. Zooming, designer Bruno Sialelli said he’d been drawn to Le Palais Idéal, near Lyon, partly because he’d never been before and wanted to see it, and partly because Cheval, who made it, “was a man who had no notion of architecture, who built this amazing palace by hand, mixing in very strange references, and it’s very interesting as a creative designer to observe this. Because sometimes the way I work, I mix references not in an intellectual way but in a way that’s more about associating things that give you what you want to say.”Here what Sialelli wanted to communicate was partly an evocation of the decade in which the house of Lanvin really got going, the 1920s. He collaborated with the estate of Art Deco illustrator Erté to include some of his poised illustrations on silk prints, bags, turban hats, men’s shirting and a leather-edged cape. The release noted that buttons were rounded to resemble a Lanvin perfume bottle designed in 1927. Around this Sialelli montaged a broader context of references, many cinematic, to effectively evoke a glamorous ensemble for what he called “a lifestyle that almost doesn’t exist any more.” By this he meant that of a carefree cashed-up caste of taste with the means to be fabulous and the discernment not to be vulgar: “because when and how are we going to be fabulous again?”That’s a valid question, and in the 1920s there lies a parallel to Lanvin’s blossoming—a precedent of a rapid aesthetic and hedonistic renewal in the wake of war and pestilence. Sialelli hopes when the time comes, people’s desires will set sail again in Lanvin’s direction.
13 July 2020
A rural postman named Ferdinand Cheval spent 33 years building the incredible backdrop of this season’s Lanvin lookbook and film. Zooming, designer Bruno Sialelli said he’d been drawn to Le Palais Idéal, near Lyon, partly because he’d never been before and wanted to see it, and partly because Cheval, who made it, “was a man who had no notion of architecture, who built this amazing palace by hand, mixing in very strange references, and it’s very interesting as a creative designer to observe this. Because sometimes, the way I work, I mix references not in an intellectual way but in a way that’s more about associating things that give you what you want to say.”Here what Sialelli wanted to communicate was partly an evocation of the decade in which the house of Lanvin really got going, the 1920s. He collaborated with the estate of Art Deco illustrator Erté to include some of his poised illustrations on silk prints, bags, turban hats, men’s shirting, and a leather-edged cape. The release noted that buttons were rounded to resemble a Lanvin perfume bottle designed in 1927. Around this Sialelli montaged a broader context of references, many cinematic, to effectively evoke a glamorous ensemble for what he called “a lifestyle that almost doesn’t exist any more.” By this he meant that of a carefree cashed-up caste of taste with the means to be fabulous and the discernment not to be vulgar: “because when and how are we going to be fabulous again?”That’s a valid question, and in the 1920s there lies a parallel to Lanvin’s blossoming—a precedent of a rapid aesthetic and hedonistic renewal in the wake of war and pestilence. Sialelli hopes when the time comes, people’s desires will set sail again in Lanvin’s direction.
13 July 2020
Both shod in sharp-toed “Patti” ankle boots, Yolanda Hadid and Isabelle Huppert sat on either side of Virgil Abloh at a show that marked a step forward for Bruno Sialelli’s Lanvin. For several seasons now, this designer has paid dutiful lip service to the history of this house via painstakingly reworked logos but not much else. Today, he seemed at last awake to the beautiful value of Jeanne Lanvin’s legacy.Sure, there were plenty of Sialelli’s favorite tailored outerwear pieces with oversized or fur-textured collars. Where Lanvin was a colorist, he is a collar-ist. However, these were less freighted with overelaborate styling (blessedly no sailor collars, although the helmet headpieces were iffy). When there was a “playful” accessory—a lipstick pendant, say, or a ceramic fox face bracelet—it was as often as not obscured by a collar or cuff as it was on display. The patisserie-box bags were straightforward gimmick pieces created to generate Insta-energy.The soundtrack referenced the cinematic via the intro toFaster Pussycat, Kill Kill!and Alfred Hitchcock’s plummily preposterousThe Hour of Parting, and it was Sialelli’s experiments in sirenish femme fatale dressing, developed mostly in the latter half, that proved the star pieces here. Ingrid Bergman wore Lanvin inNotorious, Mary Pickford was a silent-movie-era client too, and today we saw some pieces that would grace their contemporary equivalents. The pearlescent bead-strapped dresses, long and fitted, served in both pistachio and black had something of Jeanne Lanvin’s Phèdre to them. The closing gridded crystal dresses were nailed-on scene-stealers. And the two long-at-the-back, knee-length-at-the-front dresses in black and white were arresting too. They had vaguely ergonomic, monochrome beaded contouring, and the white dress was patterned in cursive etched clovers. Also worth a shout-out was the sulphurously tropical green tailoring for women. The pancake makeup, garish red lip, and fake eyelashes were way too clownish against these looks: Bergman would never have accepted such a heavy-handed travesty. Still, this was Sialelli’s best-yet Lanvin collection.
26 February 2020
Less Loewe at long last, this latest collection from Bruno Sialelli was also more focused and succinct, and less desperate. A nice touch was to take creative license—with permission sought and obtained—from Hugo Pratt’sCorto Malteseseries of what were once called comics but are now called graphic novels for the same reason designers are now called artistic directors.Corto Maltesebegan in the 1960s, continues to be popular in Europe but is less-well known in the US. It charts the progress of a tough but tender Roman-nosed maritime adventurer who encounters some of the early 20th century’s most important figures and is a bit like one of Joseph Conrad’s questing captain protagonists.Sialelli repeated his seasonal graphic gesture by incorporating attractive watercolors on shirting and cells from the comics on various pieces including some striking scarves. By the end of this collection we were basically seeing Sialelli’s version of Maltese’s garb—look 52 and look 56 especially—as the climax of a deftly navigated voyage through typical territory for this designer. The problem is that this territory is neither especially exciting nor original. As a wise colleague noted in the Uber to Craig Green after, Sialelli is part of a quite well populated post-Ghesquière designer diaspora. Sialelli has a Peter Pan-like ‘playful’ insistence on reinterpreting via infantilization classic bourgeois French masculine garms while putting his women on a beautifully crafted yet over-pasteurized pedestal. The one area in which this collection did fly was in the clearly authentically-known aside into early ’90s skate culture that included a notable oversized riff on what reminded me of Etnies’ (a French brand, remember) breakthrough sneaker with the genius Natas Kaupas: after the Half Cab, a revolution in Ollie padding. There is a talented designer hiding inside Salielli, but we’ve yet to see enough of him.
19 January 2020
Why no photo of Bruno Sialelli at the end of this set? Because by the time he got to the pit, he was lost in an audience that was on its feet and hustling for the door. You had to feel for him, although ultimately this show—and to a degree, the collection in it—was undone by an excess of ill-considered variables that needn’t have been.Obviously, it’s unfortunate to hold a show outside when it’s raining. To oblige the audience to both hold umbrellas and listen to theLord of the Flies–quoting soundtrack on headphones is fiddly, distracting, and immersive only in that several showgoers rushed home immediately afterward to change their drenched clothes. But anyway...The collection had three high-watermark moments: These were the round-shouldered full-armed suits for women, the distorted marinière-stripe knits for men and women, and the downpour of sectioned, pleated, and drapey sashed double-fabric dresses near the end. Around these finely expressed strong ideas floated way too much flotsam and jetsam—much of which appeared to have found its way to Lanvin from another shore.The menswear shirting pieces were baggy and disheveled and delicate and attractive, but they looked mightily like Loewe. Sailor collars? Come on. Sialelli is clearly clever, but he seems stubbornly stuck in the aesthetic of his work for the house upon the basis of which he got a job at this one. The thing is, this house is not that house: He needs to make this one different and distinct by designing it so. Print-wise, Sialelli moved on fromBabar the Elephantthis season toLittle Nemo in Slumberland, a comic strip by the awesomely named Zenas Winsor McCay about a little boy’s wondrous dreams. The last panel always saw Nemo awake, sometimes befuddled and not quite sure where he’d been, sometimes half-remembering, and sometimes still engrossed in the place he’d just come from. Lanvin is better now than under all its other post-Elbaz designers, but unless Sialelli wakes up from his past to define his present anew, it is never going to excite anything much—except for recognition that it looks a lot like Loewe.
25 September 2019
Seeing some wantable clothes at a show can be like contemplating a swimming pool you can’t swim in: This Lanvin collection neatly combined both experiences. It was presented this morning around Lucien Pollet’s very handsome 1933 piscine, Pailleron, and designer Bruno Sialelli suggested an expansive proposition for both genders that should be well worth dipping into once it drops.As a drone buzzed here and there for the live-stream, its downthrust rippling the waters below, we again saw from Sialelli a broadly themed collection in which he packed a magpie’s mix of eclectic elements. “It’s a collection about holidays and travel—really my idea of the summer holidays and a utopia of the summer. There are references linked to tourists of the ’70s,” he explained. The little leather sailor collars and nautical flag–patched garments on bags were, of course, seafaring references—but less in your face was the sliced curve back of an attractive azure gazar duffle that billowed from the back full sail ahead. Opening suits in sand and sea colors featured rich green wave reliefs at the leg, and there was a handsome weathered women’s suit in crushed and crispy light canvas teamed with another sailor-collar bib. The look that followed immediately after, a matching navy bomber and pant, was shipshape.There was that softly applied hippie-trail vibe in weathered-effect high-jacket suiting edged in dangled metal beads (and a tank loaded with them) that added a jaunty jangle, as well as neck-worn trinketry plus a touch of backpacking Down Under in the Blundstone-esque boots and the long parakeet cardie similar to my mother’s Jenny Kee from back in the day. More figurative knitwear included a cardigan and tank top evocative of the famous “black sheep” design so famously beloved by Princess Diana. The tank was worn with an utterly lovely loose combat pant.Other summery delights included terry all-in-one pareo/jumpsuits; sleeping-bag bags; some gorgeous frayed knit shirt-and-skirt combinations; beer label–adapted Lanvin logo accessories and shirting; and a second outing for Babar prints, which this season were extended from a silk twinset to swimwear and bags. There was also a highly attractive scarf print section, at its end played against pleated khaki suiting, skirts, and shorts. These were just a few fragments from this eventful and dense fantasy travelogue of a collection, full of fun and finely formed clothes fit to make memories for next summer.
23 June 2019
It was a bright new dawn on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Drums boomed and trumpets blared to fanfare the ascension of Bruno Sialelli to the Lanvin throne. We were gathered to witness his coronation in the original Gothic 14th-century townhouse once inhabited by the abbots of Cluny, now home to France’s National Museum of the Middle Ages.Which made you think: While no new designer should be judged by the backstory of the house that’s hired him or her, this was an environment conducive to the contemplation of the past. Lanvin’s ancient history is as beautiful as its recent history is ugly: Since 2015, its womenswear timeline has been bloodier thanGame of Thrones. To make way for Sialelli, Lanvin’s kingmakers most recently jettisoned their only functioning creative limb, menswear designer Lucas Ossendrijver, in a manner utterly unbecoming of the codes of honor, courtliness, and gentilesse that were so fetishized when this venue was built.That, however, is not Sialelli’s fault. His debut was a collection that was eager to please: a huge all-you-can-eat buffet of ideas. These included woolen jackets with sailor collars and leather ties; pea jackets with quilt-piped, heart-shaped lapels; double-hemmed kilts in mismatched checks; tricksy, check blanket ponchos; and foulard smocks for him and her in a manuscript-style St. George and the Dragon print that also popped up on pochettes and as an embroidery on a backless, rope-choker-neck dress.The venerable Jeanne and Marguerite Lanvin logo was used as a print on a skirt and pants. There was a seemingly new, all-90-degreeJLlogo that featured on both the carpet and the garments (and the sneakers between) as a monogram or standalone signature. There was mid-calf, wide-cut carpenter’s denim (and moleskin) worn with longer, silk Lanvin-logo pajamas beneath; fringed sneakers; suiting bisected by cinching panels of knit at the abdomen; scallop-hemmed, patched leather jackets; a suit-and-clog combination for men; blanket overcoats and skirts; and a fine silvery Lurex button-up dress undone by a skirt of sleeves for phantom arms.
The collection also included both-gender twinsets, minidresses, and shirts featuring Babar and Zephir (another beautiful French institution with a questionable narrative), a series of layered slip dresses with patched extra hems at the back that sometimes came embroidered with foxes, a very fine purple bobbled dress (vaguely caftan-y in mien) and, we’re nearly there, a final segue through some vaguely ’70s-looking illustrations and print on the closing pieces.And, exhale. So, while Sialelli most certainly served a diverse spread, excellently executed, much of it felt marinated in the aesthetic of another place—his previous employer, Loewe. This is understandable in this first instance. The from-every-angle blitzkrieg of variety in the collection can be seen either as the fruits of a boundlessly fertile mind or as a bloatedness borne of lack of focus compounded by a lack of confidence in any of the many subsections in this collection. Whether it is inventiveness or insecurity, all should become clearer in future collections (Lanvin’s bracingly Red Wedding approach to human resources depending). What this collection did illuminate is that Lanvin’s newly crowned prince has the potential to transition the house from its dark age to a new phase of relative expressive enlightenment. But the only one who can write that manuscript is Sialelli himself.
27 February 2019
Lucas Ossendrijver said: “To me this is such a strange season because so much is happening. And I really found the need to elevate. It’s not about streetwear or not streetwear, or do you like streetwear or do you not like streetwear? To me it’s about finding a new kind of elegance, a new kind of sophistication, and a new kind of language.”This was the background to a Lanvin collection in which Ossendrijver used polarities between “night and day, soft and hard, and flat and 3-D”—plus a rewatch of Brian De Palma’sBody Double—to create a cyclone of forces in whose heart was a different kind of calm. The striped bias-cut V-neck knits towards the end; or the wearable-either-way T-shirt-fronted, shirt-backed overshirts; or the reversible bonded bicolor mackintoshes; or the evening tailcoats in black satin that were hybridized into fisherman-style utility vests of mesh and leather, were just a few of the garments which—while demanding ponderous description—had a concise logic to them on the eye. Fabrics overlapped from one garment to another, and menswear genres too. There was an inverted collarless workwear jacket with the stitched memories of the pockets form might have demanded it include above a pair of satin-looking evening trousers which featured very low-profile cargo pockets. A long patched check shirt came with a quiet ruffle-fronted detail and a pair of patent cherry loafers came with the molded sole of a technical sneaker, a category to which Ossendrijver has been so instrumental in its incorporation as a luxury fashion category. A couple of Cuban-collar shirts of beige silk featured delicate watercolor illustrations of eyes, birds, roses, animals, and fossils by a tattoo artist the designer had found on Instagram and asked to deliver some images based on the single-word brief of “encyclopedia.” This was a collection about classifications in menswear—and the tantalizing, unexplored spaces in between those old certainties. In truth this was a show whose speed and semidarkness did not best serve a collection that demanded time and trying on and visibility to properly appreciate. Even helter-skelter, however, you could see it was worth returning to at greater leisure.Last words to Ossendrijver: “I always like this space between: not formal and not casual. Not boring and not a caricature. It’s in between, a space where things blend. In fashion I thinkluxuryis a strange word nowadays. It doesn’t mean anything anymore.
We have to elevate how we make clothes and discover how by changing that you can change fashion. And also intimacy and time and silence instead of screaming and being loud.”
24 June 2018
The most shocking thing about this collection was how not completely awful it was. Olivier Lapidus’s debut last season, which I didn’t get to, has since been spoken of in almost reverential tones as a low-water mark of terribleness—down there with Kanye West’s Paris debut and Lindsay Lohan’s Ungaro moment. It prompted a Vanessa Friedman piece inThe New York Timesmercilessly headlined “How to Wreck a Brand in Three Years.” It sounded amazing.Why so? Well, really wonderful fashion collections and shows are few and far between. You’ll be lucky to get four or five absolute stormers in a season. Even rarer, however, is the lesser-spotted fashion apocalypse, a toxic torpedo of a show so bad it’s unforgettable. These are collections—in a weird, twisted, and probably totally wrong way—that you kind of cherish. Especially if you get to write about them.The good(ish) news for Lapidus and Lanvin is that this show was no such ruinous apocalypse. Most of it was eminently forgettable. The low points included some poorly cut drop-crotch flannel pants with a silk cummerbund, a biker jacket in an unlovely orange with an odd assaulted-neck-brace neckline, and stirrup pants (the same orange) whose stirrups were tied under the heel of the shoe: ugly. These were missteps, but nothing profoundly offensive.Plus, the bags were good (especially the straps with built-in phone holders); the saw-soled python or leather boots were cool; and Looks 1, 16, and 24 worked pretty well. There is clearly still enough savoir faire within the house to make pieces beautifully, although the emphasis on heavy silks did little to help showcase that.The enduring problem for Lanvin womenswear is not who the designer is, but who it isn’t. You know exactly who I mean. After him, poor Bouchra Jarrar did fair enough work, especially following her first collection, but wasn’t given enough time, something she surely deserved after shuttering her own label to take the gig. Now Lapidus has Lanvin, a label that recently seemed a fantastic chalice of all that is great in French fashion, but which now feels poisoned. The only way Lapidus can suck out that venom is to produce collections that are unforgettable in a good way and to do it consistently—for years. Today represented an improvement on his hastily assembled debut, but the angle of his ascent from last season’s abominable to this season’s meh is not nearly steep enough to suggest he’ll hit the required heights of unforgettable especially soon.
Neither of the two looks that generated faux-spontaneous applause at this show (a classic red flag for neurotic management) were among the better ones here, which perhaps suggests a taste vacuum at the top and among its claqueurs. The problems at Lanvin womenswear are absolutely not of Lapidus’s making, and he should not be blamed for them. But can he solve them? That’s a mighty big ask, which, again, went unsatisfactorily—but not so epically terribly as last season—unanswered today.
28 February 2018
In his first pre-collection for Lanvin, Olivier Lapidus set out to establish the label’s current identity by mining the distant past. There’s a lot to sift through. Lanvin is the fashion world’s grande dame—the oldest continuously operating fashion house in France. What’s more, next year marks its 130th anniversary. Talk about a tight deadline.In his process, Lapidus decided to zero in on the house’s founder, Jeanne Lanvin, as well as her entourage. “I wanted to give a meaning to the history,” the designer explained, noting that Madame Lanvin was the first fashion designer to venture into collaborations with artist friends, such as the illustrator Paul Iribe. She also coined the termlifestyle—anyone curious to see what she meant by that should visit the reconstitution of her Art Deco–era apartment, designed in collaboration with the furniture maker Armand-Albert Rateau, one of the highlights at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.“What I found, above all, is that Jeanne Lanvin was extremely modern,” Lapidus noted. “She liked secrets and hidden things.” To reinforce visual branding, Lapidus has reworked the brand’s mother-daughter logo by Iribe on buttons, the thread linking their hands, and put an embroidered grosgrain ribbon under jacket collars, which the wearer can wear up or not. Somewhat less subtly, a long-forgotten JL logo from the 1920s has been resurrected and restylized as zipper tabs and a signature on knits. He even went so far as to transcribe the house’s name into Morse code, and from there into a fine ribbed knit—“an illegible logo,” Lapidus quipped. But he had it patented just to be sure.With the notable exception of select pieces, such as fuchsia draped or ruffled evening dresses and a bold, graphic statement coat punctuated with gold embroidery, the emphasis was squarely on sporty separates and daywear—fluid, seamless skirts; fine knits and suits in menswear fabrics with a pagoda-sleeve jacket. The accessories line, including several jewelry stories by Elie Top, added some extra oomph.The Lanvin woman as Lapidus sees her lives somewhere between fashion-forward (but not too) and classic (but not too), so his mission now after a not-so-great start on the runway last September, he said, was to “give the house’s signature elegance a contemporary twist.” So far, the accent seems to be on contemporary. Lapidus allows that there’s a new artistic collaboration in the wings. That could prove a neat piece of symmetry. We’ll be watching for the twist.
29 January 2018
They played “Unfinished Sympathy” by Massive Attack as Lucas Ossendrijver’s last look in this powerfully good Lanvin collection passed by. Why so good? Perhaps nowhere else in menswear this season has a designer delivered such a compelling catalogue of inventively nonderivative product (buyer and stylist catnip) via such a singular, sensitive, and relevant thought process (critic catnip).To track Ossendrijver’s progress through that set of pole-born spotlights, the starting point was “the most unwanted and unloved garment that there is at the moment: the suit.” The first eight or so looks used English-milled wools—plain, check, stripe—to deliver reduced then rebuilt versions of the two-piece staple that Ossendrijver observed has long been reliable masculine camouflage: “You wear a suit when you want to blend in.” Jackets were elongated into overcoats, lent extra strength with two volumizing pleats running from behind the shoulder to the top of the knee and peppered with technical pockets. Sometimes they were worn layered under down-filled, semi-detached gilets or rain cloaks in off-pattern suiting fabrics; it was unclear where one garment ended and another began. A jacket bled into the dungarees above and below it. Insertions of shearling, flashes of more organic pattern at the neckline, and galvanized suede high-tops with technical lacing all served to surprise the eye still further in this redrawing of tailoring’s camouflage template from something set in stone to a new and constantly fluctuating proposition.Slowly the métier shifted from formal to less so, and the pieces became more explicitly ruggedized and outdoorsy. Treescape camouflage photo prints were mixed and matched on shirting and bowling bags, or cut into outerwear alongside segments of shearling. Cut-into knitwear was tilted across the body. There were jackets in sliced panels of suede with moleskin pockets and D-ring detailing impressed with little pearlescent and steel beads, others in a hand-crocheted leaf relief, and long coats of double-faced, striped blanket material worn over fleece V-neck vests with primitive patterning. The camouflage was the variousness of it all, the diversity, all jumbled in vivid harmony but so mixed up as to defy categorization. Some of the bulkily asymmetrical outerwear that Ossendrijver is so proficient in had the wordsomedayprinted at the sleeve or skirt.
What was that about? “It’s from a phrase we used a lot, a phrase we came across: ‘Someday this pain will be useful.’ ”That was Ovid, originally; a bit of a downer for sure, but a call for resilience, too. “It’s such an uncertain time, and in uncertain times you have to be stronger,” as the designer put it. This collection was no wallow in the mire, but an exploration of how masculine codes might be ripped apart and reformed to suit a new world without dismissing the best of the old. “It is a little bit like a slap in the face,” said Ossendrijver, adding, “Fashion can make us feel better . . . can be uplifting.” As pieces of anti-uniform for masculinity due a reset, these were persuasive templates.
21 January 2018
Reel back to theSpring 2016 Lanvin showfor a minute. At the end of what turned out to be Alber Elbaz’s swan song collection, the one before he was dismissed, he put in a finale that was smothered in hand-drawn Lanvin logos and dresses printed with pictures of shoes, bags, and perfume bottles. His play on branded merch seemed puzzlingly out of character at the time, but in retrospect, was it actually his prophetic comment on where he saw the values of the fashion industry heading? Two years down the line, and two designers later, there were prominent Lanvin-logo prints and Lanvin-logo bags on the runway again. This time, they were by Olivier Lapidus, who has taken the place of Bouchra Jarrar, the young designer who closed her own label to join the company but ended up being given the sum total of two runway shows in which to prove herself before parting ways.The rapid hiring and firing of designers is not unique to Lanvin, of course. It’s often the way of the business world that creative people are seen as secondary to the importance of brands. Yet, casting our minds back even further, it was Elbaz and his creativity that brought the Lanvin brand alive. In thereview of his first show, in March 2002, cached on Vogue Runway, mention was made of the fact that his collection made reference to “Lanvin’s identity as a successful seller of men’s suits.” It didn’t mention anything other than that about the label’s history.As a matter of fact, Lanvin is still a successful seller of men’s suits—it has the brilliant designer Lucas Ossendrijver in that department. But what about the current meaning and direction of the women’s side? Is Lapidus the man who can bring his own sense of soul to the brand? It’s far too early to judge that. Having only been hired in August, with a few weeks to prepare a collection for the world’s press, he chose an old-school raised runway as the stage for his black draped dresses and pantsuits. It was enough to perhaps fit somewhere within the “minimalist” revival of the season.And then, there were the logo prints. We’re in a logo-revival moment, it’s true. Plenty of other designers have been riffing affectionately off their shared nostalgia for the logomania craze of the early aughts. Lanvin’s weren’t ironic. Lapidus will need time, and to dig deeper than this to bring some emotion back to the brand.
27 September 2017
You’re likely wondering whether this latest Lanvin collection was overseen by Bouchra Jarrar before her departure was announced on July 6; the official word is yes. The walkthrough took place both after she had left, and once Olivier Lapidus had been named her successor; which is to say, the maison’s narrative has shifted dramatically since Jarrar would have begun envisioning what she wanted these clothes to express. This much seems clear: They weren’t designed to disrupt. On the contrary, a relaxed ivory tuxedo, and flattering day dresses in poplin, or else in broderie anglaise, looked well-made and well-heeled without declaring any assertive statement; see the collar flounces and handkerchief skirts. What might endearingly be referred to as a “Bouchra bomber” signaled her brief but lasting influence of polished pieces that mingle well, while fabrics of varying weights and degrees of exposure (one dress was shown with sleeves and without) addressed women across a variety of markets and demographics. The strongest impact came from total matched looks—shoes and bags included—covered in floral motifs, whether a vivid emerald print, a bronze lamé, or a textured jacquard. All these stylized daisies weren’t random; in French, the flower translates asmarguerite, which was the name of Mme. Lanvin’s daughter. Also noteworthy: the way in which the signature Lanvin blue became a faded shade of duck egg, which was applied throughout the offering, from a satin trench to the accessories. Such sotto voce branding felt well-considered.Those who would rather take a wait-and-see approach might still be seduced by the bags and jewelry. Regarding the latter, the delicately shaped petal designs captured the sensitivity that women associate with Lanvin. It was pointed out that the curved metal hardware on one of the bags suggested a smile, but this may not have been the original intention. Yet given how Lanvin still faces some unresolved internal issues, any projection of hope could be read as a welcome sign.
1 August 2017
At the end of this Lanvin show the models rushed back into the square show space from every different direction, striding fast up to whichever bench was in front of them, then swerving at the last to avoid it and rushing off on another tangent. It was chaotic, hyper, high-bandwidth intense; like Grand Central at 5:30 p.m. or Times Square if every tourist had drunk too much coffee, or my head right now sitting outside a café/tabac with 15 minutes to spare before the next two appointments on Vogue Runway’s master menswear spreadsheet.It was, said Lucas Ossendrijver backstage, too much information. “It’s about the way we get information, the way we need information, nonstop. [In fashion], we are always checking; who’s where, what’s going on, it’s like every day you are waiting for something to happen.” Aargh! He’s right! When did you last check your mail, your WhatsApp, the NYTimes app, your voicemail?Ossendrijver seemed chilled as he described the now’s endemic lack of chill. But as the sure hand on Lanvin’s menswear tiller for more than a decade, he’s earned his serenity. This collection saw him translate the hyper-fragmentation of modernity into hyper-fragmented clothing: “I didn’t want to fight it, I wanted to see it as a positive. I thought, Why not just embrace and engage?”For Spring ’18 the Lanvin man leaned into the cacophony wearing a collection that artfully grafted as many menswear genres as there are apps on your phone. The big two were tailoring and military/workwear. So micro-herringbone double-breasted jackets and topcoats featured arms, or pickets, or integrated inner shirts in a lovely surplus green washed cotton. Technical parkas with twisted hood shapes and mesh external pockets to one side of the small of the wearer’s back incorporated treated suiting fabric bonded onto Ossendrijver’s technical templates. Analogue woven panels of chevroned arrows in yellow and violet lined the collars of zip-up fleece-style pullovers and were monochrome decoration on fine-check stadium jackets. There were occasional moments of non-grafted, single-dialect semi-focus—you know, like a nice slouchy black suit—but these were rare and not necessarily necessary. Accessories included a slightly nostalgic duo of shoulder-slung compact camera cases in leather marked with an L and large rectangular box bags, also stamped, so large you could carry countless terabytes of solid-state hard drive in them.
Most wistful of all were a shoulder holster bag that contained a flute and a necklace of a carved wooden hand worn above a sleeveless purple knit over a violet short-sleeved shirt. Was Ossendrijver quietly yearning for less pixilated times? Maybe, but this was just gently whispered aside in a collection of clothes to wear while striding masterfully through the modern matrix of more, more, more. Was that all? Maybe—there wasn’t time to talk about how great the sneakers were. So you could go check WWD and BoF: Joelle and Tim might well have seen something totally different.
25 June 2017
Bouchra Jarrar has said her mission atLanvinis to describe the “tenderness and force” of women; an honorable intention. Nevertheless, at the beginning of her second women’s runway collection, audience attention to her clothes was scattered by Monday’s allegation by the casting director James Scully that Lanvin had specifically asked for white-only models to audition for the show. Joan Smalls was one of the several models—Helena Christensen, Dilone, and Hilary Rhoda included—who expressed support of Scully’s Instagram (as is well known now, he was raising other general issues about the maltreatment of models, too). Nevertheless, Smalls herself did walk in Jarrar’s show, wearing one of the best outfits, an elegantly slouchy pair of white pants, and a blazer striped with a flash of Lurex, which hinted at the pattern of a djellaba. Jarrar comes from North African heritage, is the point. Smalls subsequently put up a photograph of herself on her own Instagram account, captioned “A beautifully curated show.”Still, now that everyone is counting, it was noticeable that Alicia Burke was the only other black model in a cast of roughly 40 women. Burke was also wearing one of Jarrar’s exemplary looks—an elegant navy jumpsuit with a gently swagged asymmetric collar, and a soft, striped cardigan jacket. Before we go on, this should be stated: In times like these, fashion has a responsibility to walk its talk about women’s representation. Fashion is one of the few industries which is dominated by a female workforce and is totally reliant on the creativity, skill, and dedication of immigrants, yet also commands a massively globally visible stage. Never mind slogan T-shirts. Celebrating the entirety of fashion’s rainbow membership is the one political message that must be kept at consistently.But to clothes! Bouchra Jarrar is an excellent cutter of pants and jackets; she brought the skill and the instinct with her when she closed her own label to join Lanvin. Masculine-feminine is more or less the distillation of what French fashion has stood for since Saint Laurent himself—but what of feminine-feminine? Perhaps responding to Lanvin’s growing success in the mileu of red carpet dressing, Jarrar went to the girliest of girly tropes: the pink ballerina dress. This time, she didn’t make the mistake of rendering her “femme” dresses transparent. They had frothy flowers and ruffles at the shoulder, plissé chiffon skirts, and flat punkish men’s shoes.
That’s a formula which could work for some. Another string to Jarrar’s bow is her way of spiraling a piece of satin around a woman’s shape. Those with a slender build and a taste for understated line are going to like these.
1 March 2017
“It has force, but a lot of tenderness.” Bouchra Jarrar’s Pre-Fall collection is a glimpse of what she’s doing in the engine room to navigate Lanvin onto her own course. Apparently, it’s quite a big ship. The presentation she preferred was to conduct a personal tour around the extensive basement-level showroom where buyers were writing orders. Posh basement, though. It stretched across a huge floor, and included, as Jarrar said, gesturing toward the awards-angled section, “flou forgrand soir! And a lot of options.”Jarrar cares about the reductive power of elegance—the very French, feminist refusal of froufrou and chichi. That’s an instinct that has the potential to inspire and resonate among high-profile women who are ready to speak out now. The French got this down years ago—in fact, after World War II and the student uprisings of 1968. What we will do in our time? Possibly, it won’t be to run toward dressing in a red Lanvin pantsuit. Yet Jarrar, in these times of baseline turmoil, will be heard louder and when she clearly speaks for herself.
7 February 2017
“I’m not critiquing at all,” said Lucas Ossendrijver, carefully, after this Lanvin show. The clothes we’d just seen said otherwise. “NOTHING” read the logo on scarves, jackets, and hats. His placement of an empty symbol—a husk of alphabet-shaped symbols signifying nada—just where we are normally transmitted to by branding seemed like a gently parodic counterstatement to the festival of branding we are now seeing on runways. Instead of a logo—whether single brand as per Fendi, collaborative as per Louis Vuitton x Supreme, or ironic-parodic as per Balenciaga—Ossendrijver’s stark anti-branding felt provocative.“There is nothing: no meaning, not collaboration, no print, no art, no vintage, no decoration,” he said. “I really wanted the whole collection to be about cut, construction, and proportion—and in the beginning to take things from everyday life.”Ossendrijver’s suiting exemplified this urge to express himself through fabric and technique. The enlarged shoulders had been pressed mid-construction to create that ballooning, and close inspection revealed minor folds and kinks from its creation that were there, unlike a written logo, as readable signals. A suit in a densely flecked check of red, white, and black was further gridded by shadows from the imprint of the pressing to which it had been subjected during construction. Rich purple technical pullovers—they reminded of ’90s fleeces by Boxfresh—featured mesh and nylon and fleece that was, in fact, shearling. Climbing parkas featured dark curling inserts described by Ossendrijver as “ergonomic” that simultaneously slightly and significantly changed the yaw and silhouette of the garment—he later extended them into duffels. New sneaker designs featured a meshed upper and a puckered circling a micro-bungee to hold them fast. Cropped knits appeared here again under oversize wool jackets with internal buttoning to allow its owner a delicately different form of facade. Also inverted was a bomber jacket reverse-stitched in black suede and blue, gray, and black calf to show the mark of the hand behind it.“Future Utopia” was written on some garments. And on one, a black jacket, a quote fromLawrence of Arabia: “There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing.” So what was this utopia? Ossendrijver said, “I find it a bit worrying that everything has to be normal. I think in fashion we have to go further than that. We have to bring something new. We have to invent things.” That’s saying something.
22 January 2017
In the season when not one but two women designers get to step up to the helm of major French luxury houses, there’s a mini feminist revolution going on at the center of the Paris fashion establishment.Maria Grazia Chiuriis to debut atChristian Dioron Friday, while it fell toBouchra Jarrarto show first, atLanvin. She closed her own label to accept the creative directorship, and has done her research on the woman who founded the house, unearthing the fact that Jeanne Lanvin predatedCoco Chaneland all the other female couturiers of the ’20s and ’30s. “She made menswear and sportswear before she did women’s,” Jarrar said in a preview. That’s the gem of a fact she’s clearly been turning over in her mind, because Jarrar is innately a tailor for women. Among appreciative followers, she’s known for her meticulous hand—a way of cutting and fitting pantsuits, biker jackets, shirts, and trenches that is incredibly Parisian, rigorous but sensual at the same time.She has brought those signatures to Lanvin, and her new start was ambitiously staged in the gilded, chandeliered hall of the Hôtel de Ville because, as Jarrar put it, “It’s at the heart of Paris!” Her opener was a fluid silhouette of an oyster charmeuse pantsuit with a long djellaba-like striped chiffon shirt floating beneath it—perhaps the subtlest of nods to her own heritage as a girl with Moroccan heritage who grew up in the South of France. Jarrar-isms recognizable to aficionados came later—dense feathered collars implanted on biker jackets and gilets—but inevitably all eyes were on how far she would integrate or extend the work of Lanvin’s former creative directorAlber Elbaz. He, after all, was the one who established Lanvin as a label with a dual reputation for draped dresses and madly intense embellishment.Jarrar can drape, too. She cut her teeth working forNicolas GhesquièreatBalenciagaand then atChristian Lacroix. She’s a more reserved character than her predecessor, but she can drape a great silk velvet halter-neck top and whip a black organza minidress out of a single piece of fabric if she feels like it. More interestingly, the resources at Lanvin have brought out a penchant for jewelry in her—gold knots of chain mail and crystal as choker necklaces, diamanté strands dripping over hands, and long woven ribbons of gold thread that filled in the plunging necklines and sparkled beneath evening jackets.It’s the kind of jewelry women who don’t like formal, traditional jewelry ought to gravitate toward.
As it turned out, Jeanne Lanvin was already on that path in 1925, when she designed a silver bugle-beaded tie-shaped fabric necklace for women. Jarrar has brought the piece back—and it’s all the Lanvin woman will need to feel “dressed” for evening, in the comfort of her tuxedo suit. Whether there’s a woman who will accept Jarrar’s totally sheer, gauzy lace-trimmed black dresses as event- or eveningwear is a whole other matter. She probably needs to work more on figuring out what a new Lanvin dress means to a modern woman, but she has plenty of time for that.
28 September 2016
Bouchra Jarrar, the new artistic director of women’s collections atLanvin, is in New York this week quietly showing her debut offering for Resort to the American department stores that have long stocked the French brand, designed for the previous 14 years byAlber Elbaz.Jarrar had just two months to work on the collection, which includes ready-to-wear, shoes, handbags, and jewelry. It’s a much expanded purview from what she did at her eponymous label, launched in 2010, but at a breakfast meeting at the Mercer Hotel this morning, Jarrar was calm and focused, betraying no anxiety about stepping into the shoes left vacant by the well-loved Elbaz.Back in January, shortly before her last couture collection for her house, which she is shuttering, Jarrar expressed interest in the open spots at Paris’s top design houses. Now that the Lanvin job is hers, she’s setting about building Lanvin’s new “vocabulary,” a word she used frequently during our meeting. Followers of her eponymous label will recognize Jarrar’s clean, minimal lines in the preview pics published here, but the use of such vivid color and romantic floral prints (of orchids, lilacs, and pansies) are both new.“There was no brief,” Jarrar said. “It’s an open page, and that was important for me.” Still, she’s started out with the basics, pieces she identified as a trench, le tailleur, la robe, and flou, or draping. “Daywear is really important for the house,” she began. “Also to bring my own vision to cocktail and evening, with a sensibility of the 1930s. In that period, the wardrobe and evening dresses were very simple, very pure. It’s a balance between how to be elegant anddécontracté—cool or relaxed.”A silk foulard and a crisp blue cotton poplin button-down feature a logo Jarrar found in the archives. “Jeanne Lanvin always worked on the logo. It was a kind of tribute to her that I wanted to do.” If the fact that Lanvin’s founder was a woman holds resonance for Jarrar, her process is not like that of other female designers who say they make what they need and want for themselves. “It’s not for me; it’s for all women,” Jarrar says of her approach chez Lanvin. “I understand the power of clothes. It’s why I give a lot of attention to proportions; I like to optimize them. I want women to be beautiful, that’s my job.”Jarrar says there are plans to show the Resort collection during the July couture shows in Paris.
A Spring runway show is also in the works; it will be in a new venue and on a different day than it has been in recent seasons.
21 July 2016
“It’s a strange time in fashion, and in the world in general,” said Lucas Ossendrijver, clutching a bouquet of white roses like a spring bride. You bet it’s weird. The roses were actually foisted on him byLanvin’s owner Madame Wang, whose wide grin indicated approval. She tried to get Ossendrijver andBouchra Jarrar, the quiet new head of Lanvin’s womenswear, to pose together for photographers. But the press descended first, to get their sound bites.To go back to the start: If it’s a strange time in fashion, it’s particularly strange at Lanvin, where the architect of the house’s contemporary success was ousted, and has been replaced by Jarrar, a designer yet to show her first collection. All this in less than 12 months. We’ve seen a selection of timid Resort looks from her, but the real test comes in September. Which makes this an odd time for Ossendrijver, unsure of how this changing of the guard could affect his own aesthetic.Ossendrijver finished that opening sentence by declaring “I decided to be creative. There’s not much else I can do.” Which is all you want to hear of a fashion designer, really.Appropriately enough, given the bouquet he was cradling, Ossendrijver talked about romance. “Lanvin is all about romance,” he said of a collection with belts and necklaces pierced with metallic arrows, the same knitted into intarsia sweaters above love poems wound around the waist. Those were the literal; you could also ally the general blowsiness and breeziness to Romanticism of the 19th-century breed. That’s a clothing style that is also inextricably linked to Lanvin, particularly its menswear, where softness prevails, tailoring blurring intoflou, the whole thing characterized by lightness and lack of structure.For Spring, that Lanvin romance also translated to a sense of movement and urgency, of fabric flailing about the body, endlessly layered. “Nothing is closed,” said Ossendrijver, talking about flyaway coats and open-necked shirts, everything tugged apart, untucked, rumpled. A number of garments were permanently creased—Ossendrijver and his team painstakingly constructed parkas by hand, only to crush and crumple them under a press before the show, negating their preciousness.These are all aesthetic tricks Ossendrijver has explored before—that purposeful distress, those schlumpy layers. These strange fashion times seemed to have caused a retrenchment, to territory Ossendrijver knows well.
This time, though, all that Lanvin louche wound up feeling a little messy overall, your eye extrapolating single garments from looks—a handsome blue coat, a candy-stripe red and white shirt—that otherwise wound up a morass of material, seams tugged to the outside, artfully unraveling. It’s great to have details like that: Indeed, their use as points of differentiation was how Ossendrijver established Lanvin’s position in the menswear market a decade ago. This offering could have used a little less romance and a bit more restraint, though. Absence, after all, makes the heart grow fonder.
26 June 2016
Since there is still so much emotion around thedismissal of Alber Elbaz from Lanvin last year, it is perhaps fairer to draw back and assess what the Fall collection, which was designed by a team, was, and what it wasn’t. What it was: a collection of shiny, stiff brocades cut intoDynasty-era high-eighties suits and asymmetrically peplummed tops, interspersed with lace blouses and satin dresses. A palette of peach, seafoam green, and mauve, ending with a black jacket with multicolored jeweled lapels. What it wasn’t: anything recognizably influenced byElbaz, from the setting to the sequence.At the beginning, the jewelry—metallic chokers and dangly earrings—showed some spirit. But otherwise, the clothes seemed to bear little evidence of the sensitive cut, expert fit, and general flourish whichLanvinclothes communicated when Elbaz was in charge. To go forward, the company will need to change more than the venue and the lighting, as it did this season. If it is going to command space in the highly competitive fashion arena, it needs distinctive leadership and soul. Without either, it is hard to see how Lanvin’s high-fashion products can be distinguished from so many labels which populate the general swath of the mid-market.
3 March 2016
Fall 2016 marks Lucas Ossendrijver’s 10th year designing forLanvin. It’s an anniversary that has been eclipsed, it’s fair to say, by departures, both rumored and actual. Not least of Lanvin’s artistic director,Alber Elbaz,back in October. Ossendrijver wouldn’t be drawn into discussion of that ahead of his show Sunday morning, bar stating that the situation had made him consider what motivates him, why he wants to design clothes, why he loves it. It seemed a well-rehearsed line, which doesn’t mean it isn’t true.There’s a lot of love in the clothes that Ossendrijver makes. On the runway, these are articulated in the minutia of finishing—multiple stitches, unusual construction techniques, odd materials, a feel of the hand. It’s often lost in a vast catwalk panorama, so although Ossendrijver occupied a grand space on Paris’s outskirts, he pulled his audience in close and intimate, the runway rendered a few feet wide. “Zooming in on details,” Ossendrijver called it, echoed by motifs of things like hacksaws and keys, “things you touch with your hands,” he said. A series of jackets were spray-dyed, and pigment was also sprayed across the shoes (in the only overt acknowledgement of his anniversary, Ossendrijver reissued a clutch of sneaker styles from his decade at the label).The overall feel was lived in, pre-worn, an affectionate scruffiness. Ossendrijver balled up his sweaters into bags and tossed crumpled tweed coats onto hangers not through carelessness, but reality. “It’s clothes,” he shrugged. “You should wear them. They should live.”Reality was what Ossendrijver was hankering after, joining a chorus of voices lusting after the falling-apart for Fall. It’s not really deconstruction, rather a rinsing off of residual starch and stuffiness, and generally beating up everything a bit. Tailoring was fluid to the point of runny; inside details—besom pockets, revers, and facings—were transposed to the exterior, their flanks made from lining material. Ossendrijver had to cajole Lanvin’s Italian factories not to make everything too perfectly. “I wanted things to be believable,” he said quietly. He said it quietly on the runway too, through rumpled layers, frayed edges, creases, a sense of imperfection.It was adroitly done, but would have seemed more arresting if it wasn’t merely the closing statement, on the final day of the Fall menswear season, to a general conversation whose other participants seem more emphatic and vigorous.
Admittedly, it’s a conversation Ossendrijver helped to start at Lanvin way back when, when he slopped up suits with the sneakers he showed again today.You thought about that moment a lot. And despite the fact, Ossendrijver said he wanted to look forward not backward with this show, there was something undeniably retrospective about these clothes. Their careworn and aged feel made them feel old, in one way; their references to styles Ossendrijver used to establish both Lanvin’s name and stake in the menswear sphere, in another. The look was still seductive, for a certain type of arty man who longs for the bombast to be pulled out of his wardrobe, even if the stylistic bite was dulled.That said—wasn’t it great to see a Lanvin show that just looked like Lanvin, without the understandable confusion that could arise from Elbaz’s absence (Pre-Fallwas a mess); or the mishmash of external ideas that have previously distorted the label’s men’s offering? Lanvin may have been confirming a consensus, rather than bucking a trend, but Ossendrijver’s offering felt true to himself, to why he designs clothes, and to why he still loves it.
24 January 2016
TheLanvinteam was in New York today selling Pre-Fall, the company’s first collection sinceAlber Elbaz’s headline-making ouster last October. It both was and wasn’t business as usual. Elbaz’s witty, winning narration—so integral to the Lanvin mystique—was gone, obviously. So too was the finesse that comes with 14 years experience heading up a house. But the showroom was bustling nonetheless.Chemena Kamali and Lucio Finale have been charged with designing Pre-Fall and Fall—and who knows after that? The search for a new creative director is ongoing. Fresh from a four-year stint atChloé, Kamali, who oversees ready-to-wear, had just a week with Elbaz before he left, though she’s known him for years; Finale, who heads up accessories and whose CV includes time atGivenchyandValentino, has been at Lanvin for a year.“Our focus is on the Lanvin woman, who she was and who she could be,” Kamali said, “but the evolution of the house, as well. It’s about finding a balance between the fundamentals but also thinking of who that woman is today. How can you inject that dose of authenticity?”Kamali answered that question first and foremost by designing many pieces with a hefty bit of slouch. The velvet pants of a suit were cut generously through the leg and pooled at the floor; the proportions of a herringbone overcoat were mannish; and a Japanese polyester jumpsuit erupted with bows. Elsewhere, slip dresses worn over silk blouses and leotard-like tops were designed with an eye toward current trends, while shirts and dresses featuring plastrons trimmed with deep ruffles called to mind her background at Chloé.The ambitious collection touched on quite a few different themes, probably too many. The runway show the brand is planning for March will need to be more focused. Today’s most promising pieces were a pair of coats. A black rubber-coated cotton trench with a strong dropped shoulder, and a midi-length fur spray-painted in different shades of pastels captured that sense of real-life cool that she seemed to be getting at.
6 January 2016
And, bringing the heart, soul, and attitude back to Paris fashion, please welcome . . . Mr.Alber Elbaz! There’s a little bit of a fightback against one-note, compliantly market-obedient fashion going on at the moment, and how nice it was to see Alber Elbaz puttingLanvinout there on the front line tonight. He staged his Spring collection literally as theater, placing the Lanvin name up in glittering lights at one end of the runway and sending out a show he said was a “manifesto.” More on Elbaz’s underlying thoughts later. In the moment, it was the fast pace of his girls and their almost fierce range of character that turned this into a hit Lanvin variety performance. The show moved swiftly through “acts.” First, black and white daywear—pants and blouses with balloon sleeves or rippling flounces were followed by chic-simple silk dresses and sculptural cocktail numbers. Parodies of body-exposing draped jersey red carpet gowns, underpinned with nude corsetry, gave way to madly glittery party things with a wacky finale of busy Lanvin souvenir prints featuring patterns of shoes and bags, and funny graffitied handbags. But back to the manifesto. Elbaz described in a preview how he’d been struggling to work through the puzzles confronting designers in a digital age. “What is relevant today? Is it need or provocation? Can fashion and theater coexist?” He concluded that he should try to show all-encompassing extremes, and, just as importantly, leave evidence of his work in progress. We saw that human touch in the black dresses that were collaged from several types of lace and the lines of white basting stitches left in the folds of a black gazar skirt. Still, there is little need for backstory explanations when the transcendent desirability of clothes speaks as directly to an audience as it did tonight.
1 October 2015
Instead of his usual black suit, Alber Elbaz was wearing silken prints backstage. That maybe said less about the new collection than it did his thoughts about the need to stand out in an increasingly crowded fashion environment. "How can we do a show in a digital world?" he wondered. "You have seven minutes to make it count." The solution he reached with Lucas Ossendrijver seemed to be to pack those seven minutes with as much forward-driving urgency as possible, letting the clothes flow alongside. It might only have been the New Wave-y energy of Flavien Berger's "La Fête Noire" that cued a 1980s mood, but once that idea was planted, the pushed-up sleeves, metallic animal-print accents, and oversize suits, some with paper-bag waists, pointed straight back to that decade. So did pieces—a shiny shirt, a silky baseball jacket, a big tweed coat, a drapey jacket—that recalled the '80s affection for vintage dressing. In fact, there were slicked-back moments on the Lanvin catwalk that recalled the Mudd Club, New York's early-'80s crucible of New Wave creativity.Ossendrijver claimed the collection celebrated a renewed passion for craft and manual, artisanal attention to detail. "It's not about decoration," he said. Lanvin's decorations do indeed have a slightly haphazard quality. Is that fringe or just a lot of loose threads? Well, it's fringe, of course, and it's that sort of ambiguous touch that gives these clothes their very particular personality. Which makes them stand out, in fact.
28 June 2015
In addition to being one hell of a designer, Alber Elbaz is also a philosopher. His pre-collection shows are among the most anticipated of the season because few speak as evocatively about the fashion business and its discontents as he does. This time around, Elbaz abandoned the microphone and a mini runway show format in favor of tableaux vivants. And boy, was it vivant. Observing that Instagram has infiltrated all parts of the industry—"pics or it didn't happen" is the popular refrain; "provocation is the way to exist" is how Elbaz framed it—he hired the French artist Cyril Hatt to create an installation that will in turn infiltrate Instagram. Our feeds, at least, were clogged with images from today's event, which featured living and breathing models posing against backdrops of Hatt's fake paper car, fake giraffe, fake trees, and, yes, fake toilet. All of the fakes were variously crushed or crumpled, the point being, Elbaz explained, that what's real is better than what's faked—for Instagram and otherwise.Thus we had real clothes à la Alber: loaded with color, bursting with print, accessorized with jewelry large and bags small, and just plain bubbling over with joie de vivre. In the mix: floral-print maxi dresses scribbled with the Lanvin logo and a minidress with engineered stripes, and in between, day and evening ensembles that tapped into the vibrant palette associated with Yves Saint Laurent. Elbaz also had a number of outfits in black and white, but thanks to embellishments like fringe and ruffles and tassels, they weren't sober by any measure. An ivory column dress with a flounce at the neck and shoulders and a couple of oversize necklaces looked to us like a philosophy to live by.
8 June 2015
This Sunday, an exhibition dedicated to Jeanne Lanvin opens at Paris' Palais Galliera, and working on that retrospective made Alber Elbaz introspective. He started thinking about roots, his own birthplace, Casablanca, and everything that Morocco is capable of evoking. "It's a country of contradictions," he said. "So it was an interesting place to start a collection." And even if Elbaz insisted that influences were just a tool, to be erased in the finished product, there was an undertow of the tribal Sahara in his collection: tassels and passementerie, Berber stripes, bracelets, leather harnesses and snakeskin yokes, the shagginess of goat hair, and the gleam of gold. Emotion, intuition…that's where Elbaz was headed. "Fashion is a human story," he insisted, "an industry that makes things with its hands. High tech stole the glamour of fashion." Enter Alber Elbaz, the man to steal it back.He certainly had the tools. In one of his strongest Lanvin collections so far, Elbaz painted a convincing portrait of a sophisticated adventuress, whose clothes were souvenirs of a life lived to the fullest. In the same way that the face was once a wonderful reflection of experience (before the age-denying blandishments of surgeons and their lackeys seduced the population), the designer wanted wrinkles: worsteds and raw edges and selvage and chiffon dipped in water to give it a little shrivel. The collection was a gorgeous symphony of hems.Digging in the Lanvin archives, Elbaz found records of intarsia-ed furs made up of 4,000 pieces that took 250 hours to put together. He was gobsmacked by the intensity of that labor. "The essence of luxury," he called it. And he tried to echo it with the densely embroidered flower pieces that closed the show. They were absolutely beautiful, but they weren't perfect. That was the point. "Perfection always scares me," said Elbaz. "When people say, 'Everything is wonderful,' I know something is wrong."So imperfection trickled through the show as a supremely Elbaz-ian subtext. But if the show had a genuine common thread, it was the generous notion of wrapping. Again, a Moroccan-born inspiration—the dresses that were made for a bride on the night before her wedding, dresses that would be passed through generations and would therefore have to suit all sizes. Hence, wrapping. "I like the idea of being hugged by fashion," Elbaz said. Edie Campbell closed the show in an enveloping cape, a single tassel hanging down its back.
And if that knocked on the late Yves Saint Laurent's door (a rat-a-tat-tat that cropped up elsewhere in the show), that was the umbilical connection of two creators born under the North African sun, endlessly reshaping primal memory in their collections.
5 March 2015
After the Lanvin show today, Alber Elbaz was brandishing a piece of paper on which he'd written a number of questions to himself in an effort to pin down how he stood with fashion in this particular, troubled moment. Are intuition and need fighting each other? Is provocation the only way to be noticed? Is being normal the new retro? Uniform or individuality? Today or tomorrow? And on and on. Tellingly, Elbaz would supply no answers to these questions, but it made some sense to look to the collection at hand for clues.It was, according to co-designer Lucas Ossendrijver, loosely divided into three sections. The first focused on the uniforms of menswear: gray tweeds, glen plaids, pinstripes, army coats, and military jackets. The second edged into individuality with prints, fur, a rough-hemmed inside-out feel, and eccentric layering, like a python-fronted bomber laid over a longer jacket in a windowpane check. And, according to Ossendrijver, the last, most interesting section looked to the future. It was dark, with a hard metallic edge, which instantly put one in mind of Elbaz's question about provocation. "These are hard times," said Ossendrijver. "There are soldiers everywhere in Paris." His was one of the only explicit acknowledgements in the past few days of the recent terrorist outrages in Paris, and the stapled skins and padded or bonded fabrics had a definite protective edge.That, of course, could only have been coincidence. The collection would have fallen into place some time before the events of January 7. But even without them, there has been a shadow over the Fall ’15 season so far, and Lanvin was simply the latest label to recognize it. The early ’70s silhouette signposted an earlier time when things looked grim: vintage coats and high-waisted, deep-pleated pants that puddled on the ground; an elongated cable-knit with a languid cardigan; the palette of maroon and camel. There was a listlessness that extended to powerlessness. But maybe that was the comment that Elbaz and Ossendrijver wanted to make about fashion. At the École des Beaux-Arts today, they engineered a fundamental rejig of the traditional fashion show format. Rather than the models parading down a catwalk between an audience ranked on bleachers, guests were seated on steps where the catwalk would usually go, so that fashion revolved around the audience. It felt like a shift in power.
But what that means is a question that must go as unanswered for now as any of those on Alber Elbaz's piece of paper.
25 January 2015
Alber Elbaz's days of taking his Lanvin pre-collections on the road are over, at least for the time being. At an atelier presentation in Paris today, he said he preferred a comfortable couch and a candid conversation. Based on how editors and buyers lingered to chat, we'd say Elbaz isn't the only one eager to slow down and connect with his fellow man and woman. The clothes he showed had a similar intimacy. Loaded up with colorful crystal pendants or brooches and paired with men's oxfords or knee-high boots, the outfits had an irreverent, personal touch, like they'd been pulled out of the closet of a gal with incredible taste, not yanked from the fitting room mere hours ago.In most cases, the mix was the message. The cropped jacket of a pinstripe pantsuit was worn over a loden green coat dotted with feathers, while a gold leather toggle coat with a jaunty hood topped a short floral brocade dress. The most fabulous look combined a dusty pink fox-fur jacket, a black feather-strewn T-shirt, and a long wrap skirt in a gray tone leopard print. Glam casual. More simply, a black leather snap-front shirt was paired with a faux black leather full skirt. Lots of ideas, not least of all the notion that personal style is a thing to be nurtured and cultivated, just like our precious little downtime.
6 January 2015
Alber Elbaz insists that he knows a dress is working when he looks into a model's face and sees the face, not the dress. There were faces aplenty in his show tonight: Amber Valletta, Kirsten Owen, Violetta Sanchez, Natasa Vojnovic, and more—iconic names for those who follow models like others pledge themselves to their favorite bands. And, said Elbaz, they didn't need nearly the makeup of their younger compadres on the catwalk. Experience is apparently the best maquillage.That late-breaking bulletin fitted very well with a show that celebrated the 125th anniversary of the house of Lanvin. Inevitably, such a milestone put Elbaz in mind of the passage of time: from Jeanne Lanvin's own career as the first lifestyle designer, to the women who'd walked for Elbaz's shows over the years, to the looks he'd created for them. Prepping himself, he sat in cafés watching the world pass by and came to the provocative conclusion that, while designers busily design their days away, women in the streets couldn't care less. All or nothing—that was Elbaz's starting point for his new collection.But how that hard-core formula hit the catwalk was something else. The show opened with variations on the theme of a jersey T-shirt dress: one-shouldered, side-zipped or -buttoned, looped, snake-belted, each option sported by a model Elbaz had plucked from his past. It was a spectacular start, with a strong, simple, dramatic emphasis on the women who wear Lanvin. Elbaz sustained that mood through a reinterpretation of his own classics for the house, with pieces unstitched, topstitched, stapled, side-slit, oddly urgent in their unfinished state, before anchoring his collection at the midpoint with Kirsten Owen in an Empire-line, billowing-sleeved gown that was a plain tour de force.The slipdresses, tiered silks, and fractured laces that followed were a hybrid expression of Lanvin and Elbaz. He drew inspiration from the archives for dark brocades, for swatches of shimmer, for a final passage of richly twilit prints taken from a screen by the architect Armand-Albert Rateau, who designed Jeanne Lanvin's original headquarters. Over his years at Lanvin, Elbaz has usually managed to close his shows with his audience in a state of exaltation. Tonight was no exception, "Dancing in the Street" pounding out while the audience danced in their seats in exuberant salute.
25 September 2014
There were two doors on the catwalk of the Lanvin show today, one big, one small. They were, on the one hand, representative of the Lanvin logo—one door for the mother, the smaller one for the daughter. On the other, they had some personal significance for Alber Elbaz. Backstage before the show, he said that the best words of advice his late mother ever gave him were these: "Be big in your work but small in your life." Humility—unlikely as it may sound, it was the quality that tickled at the edge of Lucas Ossendrijver's new collection. "Men don't change every season, even every year," said Ossendrijver. "What changes is their lifestyle. We always set luxury too high. Now men are on their bikes or on the metro or using Uber. They don't wear a suit, or if they do, it's different, with sneakers, and sleeves pushed up." So that was where the collection was coming from: still with Lanvin's decadent elegance but infused with an active, urgent spirit.It was most obvious in clothes that looked like they were falling apart with their sense of pace. The topstitching on the side seam of a pair of pants was coming undone, the saddle-stitching on leather jackets was unthreading. It was an audacious effect in a collection that is famously priced high, but it conveyed a nothing-to-lose quality that was much more appealing than acute preciousness. For example, Ossendrijver talked about how the finale of the show, originally intended as eveningwear, morphed into something much more chaotic: a vest collaged from overlays of exhaustively hand-stitched squares (the result had a fuzzy, furry hand) under a leather-patched pajama-cum-biker jacket under a pristine white tux jacket. A crazy quilt. The tailoring elsewhere was subjected to similar glamorous indignity. A perfectly nice white coat had its sleeves slashed off, its back replaced with cotton voile.Elbaz's stated goal has been making luxury relevant. He's looking for the middle ground between fantasy and reality, "how to find the middle without being mediocre," as he puts it. There were all sorts of looks today that men might dismiss as fashion indulgences, but there was plenty more that answered a need for accessible individuality: suits more generously cut, exaggerated but masculine coats, even the blousons with their zipped-up hoods. That middle ground is much closer than Elbaz thinks.
28 June 2014
As recently as February, Alber Elbaz was saying that "fashion should be a factory of dreams." Today at Lanvin's Resort show, he said, "Fashion is not about perfection, fashion is about life. It is a factory of needs." Like his designer peers, Elbaz faces keen time pressures. He remarked that he'd spent several days in Florence choosing fabrics before coming to New York, and that he was "already late" with his sketches for Spring. But if his pre-presentation spiel had lost any of its romance in the intervening months, his clothes did not. This was a spirited outing from Elbaz, rich with options, elegant and easy in equal measure, and, yes, entirely up to the task of fulfilling the often dueling needs the designer is confronted with.Take the one he spoke of before the show: "We love black, but we need colors." Elbaz embraced both, featuring a brightly color-blocked silk shift dress and a peachy silk illusion neckline gown side-by-side with a sleeveless black "tux" and a black lace jumpsuit. Scarves wrapped languidly around the neck and, adorned with giant silk flowers, tied the disparate looks together. Another need: "A coat needs to be very warm but also very light." And so, Elbaz experimented with technical fabrics, but never at the expense of beauty. The black taffeta trench would've been fabulous even without the stretch that gave it its evocative, sculptural form. A white silk peasant top and long black peasant skirt, meanwhile, were proof positive that he hasn't entirely forgotten what he said back in February about dreams.Lanvin is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year. Most of the jewelry today was scaled back—most of it, that is, save for a crystal-encrusted digital watch, the time of which is permanently set to 1:25. Elbaz is serious about business, but he's still one of fashion's readiest wits.
8 June 2014
Before his latest Lanvin presentation, Alber Elbaz seemed a little nervous, like maybe he felt he'd gone too far. Guess that's what happens when you've already rated your collection Triple X—Xtravagant, Xtreme, and Xperiment. Any of those Xs has marked the spot for Elbaz in the past, but when they were combined in one collection they reached a critical mass of twisted splendor.The set felt like a soundstage, with kliegs and spots and standing lamps, and that automatically cued the chiaroscuro mood. The show was a cinematic shadow play. The faces of the models were often cast into darkness by their headgear, while the textures of their clothing also played on dark and light, especially in the fringed, ruffled, raw-edged pieces that opened the show. There was something dark, fierce, and frustrated, literally bursting at the seams, about these particular outfits. They were extravagantandextreme, and they set a very particular pace, picked up by dresses in pleated black leather or bias-cut knit or midnight duchesse satin, literally framed in glass baguettes and bugle beads.Hardware is always significant in a Lanvin show. Here, there were huge domes. They snapped a swath of fur to a layered gray suit. It's a strange effect when you drape animal skins over flannel or tweed, when the primal suffocates the urbane. And it seemed to fit right in with Elbaz's efforts to discombobulate the Lanvin he has created. By way of contrast with Spring's shiny candy wrappers, he paraded Edwardians in floor-sweeping dresses, faces shaded by wide-brimmed marabou-trimmed hats. This ghostly effect was then compounded by Edie Campbell in a dress that matched a rococo spirit with a hot shot ofnuflamenco. Xperiment!As the show ran its course, it became apparent that Elbaz's subject was time itself. In fashion, that can mean a slavish subjection to seasons or a blind faith in the classic. His ongoing obsession is to liberate women from everything remotely hidebound by orthodoxy. Understandably, that task frustrates Elbaz at times. Today, his elongated Edwardians dissolved into a torrent of flapper fringes, a furious flurry of activity that was punctuated by one perfect slipdress in charmeuse silk. Mercifully, thereisquiet in the storm.
26 February 2014
Alber Elbaz and Lucas Ossendrijver start each season for Lanvin with a word. "Our new word came to us without looking," said Elbaz after the Fall presentation this morning: "digital." Elbaz doesn't even own a computer, but he is fascinated by the questions raised by the social media community. "Do we lose our identity in that community?" There may have been an answer in the graphics that closed the show today: giant, blank faces, a little like African masks. "Identities erased," Elbaz said.There was something downbeat about such a notion, and the models, with their Berlin side-shaves and po-faced grimness, did their level best to extend it. But their poutiness hardly dovetailed with a collection that was pretty upbeat. Elbaz insisted there was nothing nostalgic, but there were infusions of the eighties in skinny Memphis-print ties, power-pop pinkness, and graphic zap. There were linear prints, round shapes: "like us," Elbaz joked, indicating lanky Lucas and himself. "We're trained to think uniform," he added, so he was keen to underscore the collection's commitment to individuality. In actual fact, what was on parade were some of the season's key trends, like major coats in every conceivable silhouette, and fur used as a decorative element (one particular panel of pony erupted into a spine of hair across the shoulder of a jacket).
18 January 2014
Alber Elbaz and co. get big points for the Lanvin presentation this morning. There's nothing like stylishly coifed, oversize puppet head mannequins to break through the noise of back-to-back Pre-Fall presentations. The collection itself proved equally charming. Elbaz said he's observed that "women are looking for more reality" from their clothes. As a designer known first and foremost for cocktail fare, his task was to "bring Lanvin into daywear," without sacrificing the label's signature joie de vivre.That meant that a smoking jacket was paired with track pants boasting tuxedo stripes down the sides, and that a glamorous leopard-spot coat was actually made from a woven black-and-white jacquard. Elbaz did a lot of clever thinking about outerwear. A duffel built on a grosgrain ribbon base had the slouched-on ease of a cardigan, while what looked like a shearling was actually a jersey coat bonded with an outer layer of mohair, and thus superlight.He took a similarly lighthearted approach to his eveningwear. A bottle-green tent gown was essentially just a T-shirt. The jaunty bow at the hip of a strapless LBD was actually part of its construction. Most winningly, Elbaz trimmed a one-shoulder jersey party dress in scads of black feathers. Whoever wears that number to the Globes this weekend is bound to have some fun.
5 January 2014
As the aggressive, building, marching-band beat of Capricorn's "20 Hz" kicked in, announcing the beginning of the Lanvin show, it appeared that this wasn't to be a collection of politesse. And so it wasn't. Put it this way: If you don't like lamé you should stop reading now. On second thought, this is lamé in the hands of Alber Elbaz, so everyone should pay attention, especially you there, in the hessian.The over-the-top use of shine in this collection was quite startling—there was more of it than in a Monte Carlo discotheque. And there did indeed seem to be a little play on the idea of "Eurotrash" in the show, with many of the models clutching trash-bag-style handbags to reinforce the point. An audience member asked Elbaz after the show whether they were indeed modeled on garbage bags, to which the designer replied, deadpan, "I don't make garbage bags." No, he makes very nice ones of high quality.Nevertheless, while the shine—all of the lamés, satins, Lurexes and brocades—might at first appear as subtle as a brick, in the hands of Elbaz, there was indeed a distinct sensitivity to it all. The fabrics were put through a variety of processes—stonewashed, vaporized, slashed, and broken—and Elbaz's playful tackling of the most unlikely of Lanvin materials en masse was still convincing. There were moments of distinct, delicate poetry, such as a long, flowing shirtdress on Catherine McNeil or the flapper dresses worn by Edie Campbell and Zlata Mangafic. This is one of those collections that should be seen and touched in the flesh, rather than just viewed in photographs.As with last season, the silhouettes this time were varied and idiosyncratic, aimed at a cast of individual characters, spanning decades largely from the twenties to the eighties but realized in the now. A new fringed men's loafer—in gold, obviously—was scaled down for girls, and it gave a carefree edge to many of the looks, particularly Lindsey Wixson's spangle-y ensemble, a standout of the show.Alber Elbaz is confounding expectations once again, in a collection that he defined as "an homage to the fabric industry," before adding, "Going to the factories, to the basements and warehouses where fabrics are kept, tells you the truth. I didn't want to do a collection based on the forest or Marilyn Monroe." Elbaz also seems to be enjoying the sense of freedom evoked by his last few collections: "I think that freedom is luxury and luxury is freedom," he stated simply.
As a designer, Elbaz has a distinct sense of independence, autonomy, and freedom at Lanvin, a place where he can continue to experiment. But ask him if he has now become a rebel, and he replies, "I never thought of myself as rebellious. I do think about what people want. People look for a dream and for fantasy in fashion." Elbaz is still pursuing the dream, and it's not surprising that it's that word which is emblazoned on items of his clothing in this collection.
25 September 2013
Alber Elbaz recently took a trip with friends who spent their whole time on their phones, photographing every single burp or wrinkle in their day. He's not the only person who has been struck by the difference between looking and seeing in our culture, but heisone of the only people with a major Parisian fashion house through which he can shape a response. Which is what Elbaz claimed Lanvin's new men's collection was. "Once, designers would go to Africa for inspiration. Now they Google Africa. So this season there were no virtual trips for us. No Google. It wasn't how it looked in a photo, but how it felt on the boys."Bringing Lanvin back to luxury, rescuing it from fashion: that was the challenge Elbaz and Lucas Ossendrijver insisted they'd set themselves. It sounded a hell of a lot like fashion to us when Ossendrijver detailed such signifiers as a new suit in the form of a viscose silk jogging outfit, or a new silhouette in the form of a very fitted three-button jacket. But the word that Elbaz and Ossendrijver preferred was "relevance," and its retail handmaiden "options." The collection was distinctive for its range. So distinctive, in fact, that this felt like the Lanvin collection for people who've never really got the label before. That jogging outfit, for instance. Call it a suit and it goes anywhere.This has been a very graphic season—flowers blossoming furiously everywhere—but Lanvin was contrary. "Nothing techno or digital," said Elbaz. Instead of print, there was texture. The last outfits were a collage of touch. "A new way of being elegant" was the way that Ossendrijver defined the sensuality of such pieces. Likewise the absence of ties and, often, shirts. But the gloriously oversized coats were more than adequate compensation, even as they helped to confirm another of the season's trends. The elusiveness of summer in London and Paris means that seasonless dressing is, at the very least, the most sensible option in these environmentally troubled times.
29 June 2013
Trust Alber Elbaz to add a bit of levity to a full day of Resort appointments. Slipping behind a desk at his Lanvin presentation this morning, he said, "I'm going to talk about lifestyle, because I heard that lifestyle brands are doing really well." Then he described typical moments in his clients' lives and the perfect Lanvin look for each. "Let's say you're on a yacht with your husband's friends and all they talk about is money," he began, and out came a draped and ruched silver stretch lamé minidress. Or "you're going to your aunt's funeral, but she left you everything." Including this fabulous multicolor glazed python trench! There were outfits for a job interview (black skirtsuit with loafer) and your first day on the job (fuchsia pantsuit and matching blouse), for your second dream wedding (a multilayer tulle confection with full skirts) and an appointment with your ex and his divorce lawyer (an embroidered gold brocade shift).Elbaz took a wide-ranging approach to his new Resort collection, as he did for Fall. Given the season—clothes in stores for months before they go on sale, etc., etc.—its diversity will be a plus. The abundance of flats, even in one case a pair of holographic sneakers worn with a draped jersey dress, emphasized the lineup's carefree vibe. It was an attitude that was accentuated by the stretch neoprene that he said was developed by a bra company. Elbaz used it for all sorts of pieces, including a traffic-stopping red cocktail dress that, as he said, "hides all kinds of things, and shows off everything else." Who doesn't want that kind of lift?
9 June 2013
The mood for the latest Lanvin show felt almost downbeat on arrival at the venue of the École des Beaux-Arts. That's downbeat in Lanvin terms, you understand, which is to say not very sedate at all by most established norms. As male ushers served popcorn, cans of soft drinks, and mini bottles of Champagne to the milling crowd, a casual, loose atmosphere was created. It was like a high-fashion fairground where you might bump into Catherine Deneuve playing pitch-and-toss.This relaxed mood continued as the popcorn was swept up and the show began. Here day and night, night and day were all mixed together, sometimes in one look. The spirit was carefree yet elegant, controlled yet not giving a damn. There was an almost twenties feeling in the first dress, an idea of a floral appliquéd tracksuit in the second look, a fifties cocktail dress in the third…Each model reveled in an idiosyncratic appearance of her own, with makeup tailored to meet her individual needs and hair mostly tied back. In anybody else's hands, this could have been something of a mess; in Alber Elbaz's, it felt like freedom and fun.A teenage atmosphere permeated the collection, a schoolgirlish view that avoided the saccharine and cute and could apply to all ages. This was most noticeable in the shoes: Gone were the ballet flats; in their place, a scaled-down version of a men's oxford. It was the sign that a much tougher girl was emerging for Elbaz this evening. She was no longer wearing prissy slippers, and her new footwear altered the entire silhouette. In one of the many standout looks, featuring a godet skirt and a top encrusted with winged insect appliqués and embroideries, the shoes transformed the meaning of such a mélange to one of a warped bobby-soxer. That was reinforced by the reams of thick gold chains, a constant motif in the collection, along with the letters that dangled from them. In this instance they spelled "cool." "There is no word I hate more thancool!" Elbaz declared after the show. Unusually for a fashion designer, Elbaz often starts his collections by contemplating spoken and written words; here, they were purposefully on display for all to see. The ones he does prefer are "love," "happy," and "help." And he wants us to pay attention to those words: "I think this is a collection about thinking," he explained. "It is about the world changing, women changing. Who's next? Which designer? Which pope? This is a collection that is not just a global view, but more a local view.
How the skills of the French atelier are valid, precious, and relevant. How you can have fashion and business and not kill fashion."This designer has always been adored personally, and now that personality is coming more to the fore in his output for the house. In Lanvin past, before the tenth anniversary point, there was much to admire. Now, with Elbaz's new, relaxed, yet almost contrary, teenage-spirited approach, there is much to love. And in case you need a reminder, you can read it on a necklace.
27 February 2013
"Proportion is fashion." That typically epigrammatic pre-show declaration by Alber Elbaz cut to the quick of a Lanvin collection that was uncharacteristically generous in its proposals for the male body—and commercial with it. Maybe such generosity had its roots in the criteria that creative director Lucas Ossendrijver laid out for the clothes: "Would I wear it? And how would I wear it?" In the past, it's always been about the designers tracing the passage of the Lanvin boy through life, a more objective stance than the one they took today. Shifting the spotlight to the subjective meant one thing: The clothes got more forgiving. That point was made perfectly clear by the fact that the show opened and closed with the same over-scaled double-breasted coat.There was an almost sloppy quality in the bigger, softer jacket shoulder, the baggier pants, the boxier silhouettes. You got the feeling that hardcore Lanvinites might have issues, but for anyone else, this was a virtual introduction to the brand. Elbaz is a great believer in intuition, meaning it's something of a surprise that it's taken him so long to intuit that the Lanvin offering in the past was a tad exclusive, and not just because it was a "luxury" label. It was refreshing to see breadth, as well as depth, in the collection's jackets and coats. For Elbaz and Ossendrijver, this amounted to a new notion of luxury, options for all, a feast of silhouettes. The biggest were the best, especially a pair of rolled-hem parkas and a languid new cut of trouser. The trimness that countered such pieces looked a little less natural, even as the season's appetite for quilting was honored in a set of fencing-trim items.The intangible with Lanvin is always its extravagance, which is often only apparent when you check the price tag or step to the till. It was illuminating to listen to Alber Elbaz today as he explained the reason why the new collection's trainers had nine colors instead of the more obvious—and budget-conscious—two. "We wanted to go all the way with things we believed in." And isn't that also the very best that Lanvin could expect of its customers?
19 January 2013
Alluding to the abundance of leopard print in his pre-fall collection for Lanvin, Alber Elbaz said, "Designers used to go to the jungle for inspiration, now we don't have time to go because we're living in one." He won't get any arguments on the jungle front from editors and retailers today—not with over a dozen pre-fall shows and appointments on the calendar here in New York.As for the animal print, if it was ever on fashion's endangered-species list, it's certainly not anymore. In fact, it's become so common, it's practically a neutral. Elbaz made it fresh by fearlessly pairing a printed sweatshirt with tapered pants in a clashing pattern, and accessorizing both with a clutch and boots in yet another version of the print, or, somewhat less successfully, by embroidering beaded daisies on printed backgrounds. As ever, there was scads of costume jewelry, while the news in accessories was floppy chapeaux in pony hair.He answered the baroque portions of the collection with classic, not quite minimal tailoring and outerwear that felt in keeping with the precision of his most recent runway show. In this group, a belted navy coat with black satin revers was a keeper, as was a black leather blouson top worn over a turtleneck and a short pencil skirt.A strapless red cocktail dress with exposed seams was the collection's one shot of color, but the real winner for after dark was an ankle-length long-sleeve dress in black-and-white animal print that looked as cool and easy to wear as a T-shirt.
6 January 2013
After Alber Elbaz's showstopping "Take a look at me now" moment at his tenth-anniversary show for Lanvin last season, the question inevitably was, "What's next?" There wasn't a song by Elbaz today, but there was definitely a renewed agenda. "It had to be, after the last ten years," said the designer. "A new start. I start again."In many ways it was a case of going back to school, in the shape of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, for Elbaz. That seat of classicism and the salon in French art was the venue for the Spring show today, but it wasn't simply a pretty, historic setting, it had been an inspiration for the designer. The spotlighted Greco-Roman statuary under the porticos above each end of the catwalk was a clue of what was to come. While the runway was being readied and star power being exercised in the skirmish down below—Kristin Scott Thomas and Catherine Deneuve were among those in the front row—in the Olympian heights above were the still, white, silent images of classical beauty.Yet what Elbaz provided was something of a cross between the two. In his new agenda for Lanvin, there might have been "purity and precision," as he put it, but he was also quick to emphasize that the collection "was not about control and minimalism." That letting loose seen in last season's offering seems to be part of Elbaz's ongoing plan: a looseness that is unashamedly interested in sex.What Elbaz declared he was working on here was "deconstructed classicism." In the exploded tuxedo silhouettes, the notion of the smoking collided with the kimono and was tied off with a bow on an obi belt. Yet the designer wasn't using Japonisme as surface style, but more as a contemporary way of looking at the classical approach to dress. It could be likened to the way that the techniques of Japanese prints permeated French art of the late-nineteenth century—as abstract structural solution rather than simple decoration. Asymmetry prevailed; experimentation and the focus on "the square" meant that some linear dresses were held together with mere origami bows, fastened at one side and revealing flashes of flesh. And yet a certain ease in this collection ensured there was also room for a black swimming costume. Worn simply with black trousers, it was one of the sexiest looks.This was a rebellious sense of classicism, more Manet's sex-drenchedOlympiathan the (h)armless (forgive the joke) Venus de Milo.
As Alber Elbaz said: "Every woman wants to look and be like a star; they don't want to match the wall!" And in the same way it is perhaps better to wear one of his statue prints than to be like one. If it didn't have the immediacy of Elbaz's last collection for the label, this outing still had the same new, spirited approach to Lanvin. There is something in the risk-taking that suits the designer no end. What's more, this collection's themes could prove significant for the season as a whole.
26 September 2012
Lanvin's men's show today marked a first for the label: the first time the clothes had been shown on an elevated catwalk, because, said Alber Elbaz, "It's time to elevate fashion." But Lanvin has always made time for that, which was clearer in this collection than ever before. From beginning to end, it had a relentless drive, defined by the tension between fashionable opposites: classic versus high-tech, linear versus rounded, detail versus no detail. And, although the presentation was staged with boyish models who were manorexic to the point of parental concern, the collection itself was actually infused with a more generous spirit than has ever been manifest in Lanvin menswear.That was partly a function of the collection'sroundness, with full, high-waisted, pleated trousers and tops whose shoulders drooped fetchingly. But those pieces were all in black and white, as atonal as the Soft Cell track "Memorabilia" that played on the soundtrack. In fact, you had to apply the beady eye to find color, usually a Lanvin strong point (find it you could, in the slim layer of Lanvin blue that shaded shoe soles). In its place there was shine, one of Spring 2013's big stories. There has always been an undercurrent of the shadowy side of glam rock in Lanvin's menswear, and here it was gloriously expressed in a silver-glazed peacoat. That contrast between tradition and tech was extended into pieces that combined reptile and nylon in a shiny union of the snake.It was such a graphic face-off that you could almost picture the collection's evolution from urban monochrome to futuristic metal as a journey from city streets to moon and stars. That narrative made this the most convincing men's collection Lucas Ossendrijver has created for Lanvin. It was also a testament to the label's enduringly strange romance.
30 June 2012
"Resort," Alber Elbaz said over the cello accompanying his presentation this morning, "is about solutions." It's a notion we've actually been hearing a lot about this season; designers are putting the focus on real clothes, not runway fantasies. Elbaz, though, is a dreamer through and through. So as practical and forgiving and easy as his clothes for Lanvin are, there's always a frisson of something extra.Often today, that something extra was the piles of necklaces and armfuls of bangles that accompanied so many of the looks. Other times it was the bags. "I heard that bags are very important in fashion," he said, announcing that he's been focusing a lot of attention on them lately.But it was the clothes that seduced, be it an emerald green crinkled silk pajama top and pants with the unconstructed, elasticized waistband of a simple slip, or an emerald green cocktail number made from a tech fabric used in the construction of bras that has the sucking-everything-in properties of a new pair of Spanx. The color palette was as bold as ever. For every loose-fitting silhouette, there was another body-conscious one. In the former category, a strapless palm tree-printed lamé dress that slouched off the body thanks to clever inner corsetry looked great, and in the latter: a sporty orange racer-back tank dress caught the eye. Dreamy, all around.
5 June 2012
There was the merest snatch of "You Don't Own Me," Lesley Gore's classic anthem of fuck-offery, on the Lanvin soundtrack today, but that was enough to cue the sense of triumph that must be powering Alber Elbaz in this, the tenth anniversary of his tenure at the house. There were the years when things didn't go quite right, when the YSL dream job turned nightmare, when he felt like the eternal outsider in fashion's sleek inner circle. But here he is a decade later, A-number one, top of the list, king of the hill, and somewhere deep inside, there must be a voice cooing to Elbaz that revenge is sweet.The clothes he showed today certainly were. But not sweet like the pyramids of cakes that greeted guests at the after-show party. No, these outfits were suh-weet in their body-enhancing shape; their intense, delicious color; their feeling of wayward fun. Elbaz has always exalted womanliness (tonight he even confessed that he'd be happy to be considered a designer who reshaped women), and here there was a generous emphasis on the curve. Roundness too, especially in skirts that flared from hips.But if you were to attempt to plumb Elbaz's appeal—and the sheer joy that seemed to animate tonight's audience shows how deep it runs—it might be the fun element that hits first. His ten years at Lanvin have given women a license to dress up, get down. The party section of the collection announced itself with gold brocade, then quickly leaped to glittering appliqués, beaded sheaths, exuberant prints, and intarsia-ed furs.The models literally had diamonds—OK,sparkles—on the soles of their shoes. And when Aymeline Valade worked the runway in a black dress with a huge white ruffle coiling around her body, it brought back memories of those purely pleasurable fashion moments when catwalk divas like Pat Cleveland shamelessly strutted in the name of style.Elbaz remembers those good times. Hence, the carnival atmosphere of his show closer and everything that came afterward. Alber himself crooned "Que Sera, Sera," with a backing group of signal figures from his past. ("Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Joey Arias on vocals, Miss Kim Hastreiter on xylophone.") But the fizzy fabulosity of the evening kicked another thought pattern into gear. All parties must come to an end, and maybe that melancholy prospect is a less acknowledged element in the appeal of Elbaz's clothes. Underneath all the dazzle, he gives you depth and a hint of darkness.
1 March 2012
"It's not modernity that's important," said Alber Elbaz. "It'srelevance." Think about that for a moment. It's a more inclusive idea than plain old wha's happenin'. So Lanvin's latest menswear show could open with a classical pianist playing live, then segue into techno, because it fit into arelevantscheme of things—a combination of the classic and the contemporary—devised by Elbaz and his men's designer, Lucas Ossendrijver.Fall 2012 is all about the suit. That much we understand already. But Elbaz and Ossendrijver felt their guys weren't interested in suits as we know them, so they took them somewhere else. It was most obvious in a silhouette that pumped out the shoulders and drew in the waist, an almost cartoonish but utterly irresistible exaggeration of male power. But the designers wanted something that felt relevant to the urban environment of the guy they were attempting to attract, so they went to the world of sport. A lot of the high-top footwear looked like boxing boots. The models, with their oversize coats thrown across their shoulders and scarves draped round their necks, could easily have been ready to dance into the ring.A potentially more influential proposition was the puffa jacket hybridized with formalwear. Forty years ago, the late Yves Saint Laurent, a touchstone for Elbaz, proposed parkas over evening dresses for the outdoor opera season at Glyndebourne in England. It blew people's minds at the time. This Lanvin collection updated the idea in a masculine way to great effect. Maybe not mind-blowing this time round, but the capper on a particularly convincing collection.
21 January 2012
This year marks Alber Elbaz's tenth anniversary at Lanvin. "We've been talking a lot about 'the house' lately," he said at his pre-fall presentation. For that reason, and because the brand is opening a new Madison Avenue menswear store soon (David Mann is the architect), construction has been much on the designer's mind. "This collection," he explained, "is about new fabrics, new technologies, and new volumes."The show's most eye-catching material was an ivory lace bonded to a nude wool that Elbaz whipped into a long-sleeved dress that zipped up the back. But there were other fabrics that the Lanvin girl might not yet have in her collection: A boxy navy T-shirt and cropped trousers were cut from spongy polyester duchesse, and a swingy red trench and matching shift looked and sounded, as he put it, "plastified." Crinkly patent leather or rubberized wool? Either way, the woman who wears it will turn heads.That's Elbaz's gift. He nails the "want" factor season in and season out. Looking particularly fresh this time around was a floor-grazing, narrow black silk skirt and slouchy oyster blouse, topped by a slightly oversize fur jacket.Jewelry is a big part of the Lanvin look, and for pre-fall, Elbaz has embraced cameos—big ones dangling from silk ribbons or pinned to the bodice of a sleeveless top. You can be sure you'll be seeing a lot more of those on the runways next month.
5 January 2012
Alber Elbaz insists that, by the time he's subjected it to his design process, there is almost nothing recognizable left of the story with which he starts each new collection. Today's effort was a good example. Before the show, he mentioned he had in mind an angel in hell, but as he drew and drew, the angel returned to earth. Still, if you let your mind go, you could imagine that the snakes coiled in appliqué across a dress or in a print down a pant leg were echoes of Down There. The shoulders that gave the collection its epic silhouette could be the vestiges of wings. And when Karlie Kloss froze at the end of the catwalk in a halo of orange light? Case rests.But all that aside, what Elbaz offered felt like his own pragmatic take on sportswear. Separates, for instance. Lanvin has always been about The Dress, but this time, Elbaz tackled tops and bottoms. One of the challenges he set himself was quite typical: How can a tracksuit work for evening? That's why he mixed the show up, daywear and dressier stuff wantonly intermingled. It created an urgent, unfinished, spontaneous mood, which was amplified by dresses that had ribbons or pleats pinned to them. It was like that with all the slits, too. They had a raw, sexy energy.In fact, this might have been the collection where Elbaz truly embraced sex. It was a major contributor to the strength of the show, along with those shoulders, which he was quick to point out had nothing to do with eighties padded power dressing. "Power you can buy in a bank," he said. "I prefer strength." Against which he paraded sheer tulle dresses that conveyed a nothing-to-hide vulnerability. Oppositions are fundamental to Elbaz, the most elementary being the reality of clothes versus the dream of fashion. He's always managed to bridge the gap by making things that women desire. Here, the desire was more palpable than ever. And helping that happen was Elbaz's conviction that "modernity is beauty." Flip that formula, then think for a moment about how simple, timeless, and radical it is.
29 September 2011
The theme fromThe Dark Knightcued a show for Lanvin that also had a heroic male as its theme. But he wore so many faces it was as though Alber Elbaz and Lucas Ossendrijver were conducting a demographic survey of the heroes of Lanvinland. What they had in common: a uniform of some kind. "The best way for men to dress," Elbaz declared. "A man in uniform is always a hero." First out was a persona the designers described as "security guard," which meant narrow, military-inflected layers scissored from bonded leather.According to Ossendrijver, the collection that followed was intended as a steady loosening up of that initial pulled-together premise. That much wasn't immediately obvious—although boots first lost their laces and then turned into sandals. But it was clear that the essence of the collection was the all-important Option, from the uptightest skins to free-flowing layers, via some new twists on urban tailoring, where the jackets had dramatically dropped shoulders. The finale threw the spotlight on a look that mashed up vintage military tailoring with graphic techno-ethnic prints in long, floppy tees. "Is it hippie or is it happy?" Elbaz mused obliquely. Either way, it was something new for Lanvin.What made it more interesting is that Elbaz was feeling that menswear has been rushing through the ambiguously gendered door that he and Ossendrijver opened five years ago. It was time, he decided, for Lanvin to man up. But let it be written that ambiguity is still one of Lanvin menswear's salient strengths.
25 June 2011
Alber Elbaz knows how to work a room. He began his Resort presentation for Lanvin by saying he'd switched back to something more informal after pre-fall's runway show because he wanted "more of a dialogue than a monologue." Then he launched into an explanation of his thought process: "I looked at Krystle [fromDynasty] because I heard the eighties were hot, but she didn't help"—that had the room in stitches. When the clothes finally did come out, if you weren't charmed, well, you might be in the wrong business.Because charming is what they were, although not necessarily the pieces that were trying hard to be. By that we mean the T-shirt that read "Save the World, Wear Lanvin" and the crystal-bedecked frocks that we've been seeing from Elbaz for years now. What truly seduced were the simplest offerings—a strapless frock in wide stripes of metallic lamé, a short number in ombré silk fringe, a halter-neck jumpsuit worn under a suede safari jacket.Madame Grès, the subject of a retrospective in Paris, proved a very seductive muse. Elbaz said he could never reproduce the micro-plissé that the legendary designer was known for—no one has the time or the money it would require—but he came up with a smart replacement: corded rope at the shoulders from which soft togalike dresses folded and draped, the best in a dazzling chartreuse yellow. Speaking of necklines, they were accessorized liberally with all manner of chokers, chains, beads, and pendants. The models wore small fortunes in costume jewelry.And speaking of small fortunes, post-show a rack of Elbaz's new children's clothes was wheeled out. The dresses will be just shy of four figures, but you know there are women out there gaga enough for Alber that they'll pay. There were certainly plenty of grown-up clothes to go crazy over today—the extended applause Elbaz received was proof of that.
12 June 2011
The backdrop to the Lanvin show was a weeping willow. "Everyone needs a tree," said an unusually low-key, flu-touched Alber Elbaz. "Branches, roots. We're getting right back to the roots of tradition." There were some of his own roots in the collection's echoes of his master, Geoffrey Beene. The New York couturier had always warned his protégé about the dangers of gazar. "So difficult," Elbaz sighed as he talked about the endless problems involved in working with one of fashion's most mystique-laden fabrics. That difficulty was captured in pieces that were sheer but somewhat stiff—alluringly so.Their austerity spilled over into the rest of the collection, at least as it initially presented itself. Elbaz went atypically dark. Maybe it was that southern gothic tree, maybe the wide-brimmed preacher-proper headgear with its irresistible echoes ofThe Night of the Hunter, or the brilliantly mixed soundtrack by Ariel Wizman that plunged into moments of sonic darkness. Elbaz at first opted for plain, grounded, coated and caped looks, with pilgrim shoes and church-lady handbags as perfectly appropriate accessories. Metal trims were a suitably austere detail. But the severity begged for release. And the designer teased, first with metallic jewelry, then with textures, severe but sensual drapes, black lace, knit sheaths disordered by poufs of mousseline, and roses. It was positively Freudian the way Elbaz built desire into his clothes, especially with the simplest nip and tuck of fabric. Or zippers, like the one running down the back of a python tunic.When release finally arrived, it was in the form of ten or so densely toned, couture-inflected confections. They gathered like strange, exotic fruit under the willow at show's end. Elbaz always insists on the reality of his clothes, but a burst ofTwin Peakson the soundtrack of this intriguing show might have been telling us that reality is whatever you make it. Like, for instance, the creative arc that runs from preacher man to party girl.
3 March 2011
TheLanvinshow this morning flew by in a flash. Afterward, the word in the air was "energy." Lucas Ossendrijver was still spinning. "Surreal, subversive," the label's menswear designer said of the show's furious pace. "But where there is tension, there is energy."The tension arose from the face-off between the classicism of the Old World and the urgency of the New. "Tailoring used in a sportswear way" was Ossendrijver's description. "Where uptown and downtown meet," said Lanvin creative supremo Alber Elbaz, adding with a gale of laughter, "But not in midtown. We hate midtown." No, not much midtown in these looks, which appeared literally dissected by speed. They stayed closed with magnets instead of buttons. Outerwear that may have started life as an officer's coat—double-breasted, epauletted—was re-seamed to within a millimeter of the models' whippet-thin forms. Though one jacket had sporty puffa quilting attached to its front, the monochrome torso was more linear than ever, made even more so by the wide-cut trousers that went with it (there were still leggings—narrow, zipped-ankle numbers—too).That particular silhouette—tightly tailored jacket, baggy pants—was the quintessence of Lanvin's mix of Old and New. It could have been Berlin in the thirties; Bowie in the seventies; Depp, Downey, or any other dandy in the Naughties underworld. What it also represented for Elbaz was "a return to elegance—the word is always being used to describe old people. When you talk about the young, it's always 'cool' or 'sexy', but we wanted to introduce elegance to the young."Helping make the introduction was an emphasis on composure and restraint. What stood out was how covered up the models were in their layers. Some wore fedoras mysteriously pulled low over one eye (another of this week's irresistible links to a Bowie incarnation—the alien Thomas Jerome Newton inThe Man Who Fell to Earth). But otherwise, everything was directed to highlighting the faces of the models. The final outfits featured velvet jackets over white shirts buttoned to the neck. Underneath, a mock turtleneck pushed the young men's faces up into the light. Elbaz and Ossendrijver have always emphasized the individuality of the Lanvin man. Here was a striking acknowledgement of that commitment.One more thing: Lanvin's dark ode to the young and the restless came with a twist.
Was that a dangling foxtail disturbing the elegance of a camel coat? "Yes, because everyone has a foxy side," said Ossendrijver, with a glittery-eyed twinkle.
22 January 2011
"It's not about Marilyn Monroe moving to India and having an acid trip," the ever quotable Alber Elbaz said about the pre-fall show he staged at the Bowery Hotel. "It's about real women's needs and desires." And since he's been noticing an increasing tendency among women to wear evening for day—"why save the best dishes for the guests?" he asked backstage—he took that as his direction. Generally speaking, that meant this collection had a much more dressed-up attitude than his hit Spring show, but fussy it wasn't.A little black dress with a ruffled collar accessorized with scads of pearls was cut in a stretchy scuba fabric (a callback to September), and everything from a gray rib-knit sweater (worn with an ivory washed silk floor-length skirt) to a tailored jacket (the top half of a 1950's wool flannel skirtsuit) came oversized and easy. As for a bronze Lurex-shot dress, worn here with a brooch-studded tweedy cardigan jacket? It was in fact a versatile little blouse and skirt. Almost all of the looks were shown with thick ribbed tights or luxe long johns, which helped to ground even Elbaz's most romantic notions—a champagne silk slipdress dripping with necklaces, for one—in reality.For kicks (and perhaps to make the most of the heightened visibility his collaboration with H&M has afforded the brand), he added a fewLanvinlogo prints to the mix. One thing is certain: In Elbaz's hands, real life is never dull. That goes for the photo shoot in Lanvin's tiny Paris atelier that produced these lookbook pictures. Something wild, indeed.
9 January 2011
"I'm not a cool designer, and Lanvin is not a cool brand," Alber Elbaz insisted with his typical self-deprecation at the end of yet another standout show. Yeah sure, Alber, and the sun won't rise tomorrow morning. But if he insisted on questioning his own coolness, there was at least no way Elbaz could challenge the clarity and intelligence of a collection that proposed a soup-to-nuts wardrobe (there were even nylon raincoats, for God's sake) of unimpeachably modern, urban chic. Exhibit 1: the girl-on-the-go athleticism of second-skin dresses and suits paired with flats. Exhibit 2: the ludicrous amounts of glamour with which Elbaz managed to swathe that prosaic proposition.The skin thing was a big deal. As a designer, Elbaz is feeling put out by the way women can buy themselves a new body these days, courtesy of their local cosmetic surgeon. He loves a wrinkle. So he created a collection that was a hymn to skin: wrinkled in Fortuny-like pleating, stretched in all those sheaths. It was a spectacular foundation on which he could lavish increasingly heady colors. From its elegantly taupe-y beginnings, the show spiraled through acid yellow, hot pink, and aqua. Karlie Kloss looked like a great big Georgia O'Keeffe flower as she sashayed down the runway in an opulent orange skirt. And it wasn't only color Elbaz toyed with. He layered on the embellishment with pagan metalwork, climaxing in a gladiator skirt. There's always been that hard edge with him—here, it was apparent in the metal bracelet that cuffed the shoe to the ankle, the leather harness, and the zippers that ran up and down his dresses, back, front, and sides. Arch fan Janet Jackson nailed it backstage when she pinned down her Lanvin persona: "I'm the baddest bitch on the block."In fact, she had some competition from the models who stalked the catwalk for a finale that brought to mind Yves Saint Laurent's epochal heyday. And, with his hot-wire to the way women feel like dressing now, Alber Elbaz could be the most natural heir to that particular throne.
30 September 2010
"An antidote to laziness," was how Alber Elbaz described the show for Lanvin's menswear today. It was all about action, mobility, urgency—to the point where some of the clothes had a frenetic, unfinished quality, with ragged seams swirling around the body and rough hems edging, among other things, a biker-influenced jacket.Elsewhere, there were the narrow silhouette and the fundamental athleticism of torsos wrapped at waist or shoulder, or the sporty leanness of a striped top over what looked like bike shorts. This morphing between high performance and something more conservative was the not-quite-sportswear essence of the collection.Both Elbaz and his lieutenant, Lucas Ossendrijver, put the emphasis squarely on textures. "You want to touch them," said Ossendrijver, "It's something intimate." A suit in floral embossed silk cloque certainly met that criterion. So did a hooded coat in a complex patchwork. Intimacy defines Lanvin's womenswear. Its recognition here underlined what Elbaz acknowledged as a growing synergy between the men's and women's ranges. "Togetherness is really strong in this collection," he remarked.That was probably why jewelry was such a major issue in the show. It was big, bold, and barbaric. "Souvenirs," said Ossendrijver. "When women can wear pants, men can wear jewelry," Elbaz added. And, truth be told, this season it was the baubles that carried a lot of the subversive, insidious charm that has made Lanvin menswear such a draw for retailers.
26 June 2010
"Pre-collection isn't about an image or a direction. It's about a woman, a desire, a need," Alber Elbaz said as he narrated his Lanvin mini-show in a manner at once thoughtful, amusing, and heartfelt. "What do women want?"For this inventive designer, it seems there are plenty of answers to that frequently asked question: a simple black A-line shift that reverses to a trompe l'oeil tiered tulle dress, say, or a day trench that, turned inside out, is ruffled and ready for a night on the town, or a gold coat whose sleeves unzip to become a shirtdress. On paper, some of that might sound gimmicky, but the effect of Elbaz's two-in-one ideas was utterly charming and unforced—not to mention incredibly savvy at a time when women are still relearning how to shop.The designer's other real-world solutions? Bathing suits with matching cover-ups; a versatile cotton metal fabric that can be manipulated (tug the hem of a skirt down for day, hike it up for after dark); luggage and handbags made from python print, not the real thing, so they don't cost a fortune; and a stretch skirtsuit. Sexy and forgiving at the same time? We'll take it.Elbaz is without a doubt one of the most woman-friendly designers around today. His real trick, though? Marrying need to desire. Take the floor-length halter dress inspired, he said, by his customers in Miami, who think nothing of wearing long during the day to go shopping at the new Lanvin store there. An outfit like that may not be a necessity for the time-squeezed New Yorkers in today's audience, but that didn't stop the audible collective swoon.
13 June 2010
How to satisfy the contrary demands of women's fashion desires? It's a problem vast enough to send many designers crazy, or to make them stick their heads in the sand and fall back on safe retro formulae. At this moment, when fashion finally feels like it's teetering on the brink of something new, that isn't good enough. And for designers of Alber Elbaz's caliber, the only way is to face up to complexity. For Fall, he walked a knife edge, balanced between rigorously architectural urban simplicity and explosively fierce embellishment, sourced somewhere in African tribalism.Before his show, Elbaz reeled off the loops he'd put himself through to get there: "Women ask for masculine tailoring, but they want to feel fragile. They want daywear, but buy evening. I designed a whole lot of draped things, but then it looked like too much. An overdose of fashion." His change of heart came on returning to the studio after a meeting at the U.N. to learn about a role he is about to take up as a UNICEF ambassador. It cleared his mind to work on plain, molded city clothes on the one hand, and made him think about Africa, his birthplace, on the other.The link between the two presented another of the season's essays on powerful womanhood. For day, it began with no-nonsense, clean silhouettes cut from matte stretch materials with a molded structure; dresses and coats were cut roomy in the shoulder, tapering to clutch the hips. The technical starkness was gradually steered away from minimalism-by-rote with the addition of chunky metal and rock-crystal jewelry and beaded spine-tracing zippers, building up to dynamic feats of diagonal pleating that crossed the torso in one direction and shot across the hips in the other.To a soundtrack of fast-paced drumming, Elbaz kicked up the emotional speed with waves of cocktail and eveningwear that spanned simple jersey togas, erotic lace transparencies, glamorous ostrich- and marabou-decorated dresses, and intensely bejeweled and feathered gold or green-tinted lamé. In real time, it was visually sensational and layered with dynamic contradictions, like the fact that baseball jackets, sweatshirt shapes, and track pants were the carriers of some of the most exotic embroideries. That might not wholly read in photographs—blame the grim lighting in the inhospitable warehouse on the outskirts of Paris that Lanvin and other luxury-goods houses have inexplicably taken as a venue recently.
But Elbaz's contribution to the season is guaranteed to keep the fashion world thinking for a long while yet.
4 March 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
23 January 2010
"Can we introduce some dream into daytime?" That was the question Alber Elbaz posed for himself when he began designing pre-fall, and judging by today's informal runway show, the answer isbien sûr. Yes, there were some straightforward looks—a three-piece gray flannel suit and a black denim trench worn over a washed leather cargo vest and skirt—but for the most part, Elbaz took his inspiration from the "leopard lady." A real Frenchwoman that the designer and his cohorts often see in Paris, she is by all accounts never without a leopard coat even at the height of summer. Her more-is-more aesthetic informed the collection's mix-and-match animal prints, the patchworked and collaged furs, and the bijou-bedazzled tops and skirts, all of which were accessorized with scads of necklaces, lacy stockings, and foulards. As fantasies go, it's a seductive one, but is there a danger it won't play in reality? Not really—all a Lanvin girl need do is peel away the layers until she finds the one item that her wardrobe isn't complete without.
10 January 2010
It takes a lot—a gilding of genius, in fact—for a designer to drag several hundred tired, hard-bitten professionals to a bleak industrial shell on the outskirts of Paris, and then send them away feeling ecstatic. That, though, is what Alber Elbaz did in a show that was a bombardment of emotional and visual pleasure. It climaxed in an overload of color, glitter, and originality: the sight of dozens of girls marching, with a furious glamour, along a runway so long it seemed to stretch into a foggy infinity.The collection was a triumph of breathtaking technical achievement: drapey, pleated jumpsuits in polyester ("like collapsing fabric," Elbaz said); a candy-store array of pink, salmon, peach, and vermilion; a dash of extraordinary fine leather (an unforgettable carnation red dress); and a buildup of encrusted gold sequins and jewelry. The designer didn't really have words to sum up the powerful, slow-building impact of the vision he'd created. All he'd talk about were the technical difficulties of handling the polyester, making spirals of ruffles, inventing a soft, puffy form of quilting for coats, and how he'd ended up layering one dress on another to make a whole.And, in fact, it didn't open all that promisingly. The first passage Elbaz fielded was in black, with ruffles—the familiar Lanvin aesthetic that is visible in stores worldwide. Only when he got past the tailoring and into the intense passage of developments of plissé (a kind of modern, abstract Fortuny pleating), as well as the navy and mushroom jumpsuits, did the mood lift and the audience realize that something incredible was transpiring. In the end, as the girls—headed by the crop-haired Iris Strubegger and a rivetingly intense Karlie Kloss—walked back into the darkness under a giant Art Deco chandelier, every head in the crowd strained to take in the last glimpse of a collection that will be remembered for a very long time.
1 October 2009
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
27 June 2009
The Mexican Tourism Board might want to enlist Alber Elbaz to help bring vacationers back. Walking editors through his delightful Resort collection, the Lanvin designer cited Acapulco as an inspiration. You could see it in the lime- and watermelon-wedge pendant necklaces, the straw hats decorated with tropical fabric flowers, and the raffia-accented flats, as well as in a long blue silk sarong that had the easy sensibility of a bedsheet a honeymooner might wrap herself up in post-"siesta." A slouchy T-shirt and cropped, sequined pajama pants topped by a full-skirted, crinkled trench made for a look that was just as nonchalant, if a bit more citified. In fact, Elbaz thought of everyone this season— beachcombers, urban sophisticates, even brides-to-be—because alongside Resort, he showed user-friendly capsule collections of denim, long dresses, and ready-to-wear wedding frocks.
14 June 2009
"People keep trying to divide designers into optimists and pessimists, but me—I'm a realist," declared Alber Elbaz. "I thought with my heart about what women need from fashion—dresses, suits, blouses, coats. Life isn't just parties and lunches." With this empathetic orientation, Lanvin for Fall added another dimension to the revival of Parisian values that are turning out to be the distinguishing feature of the best of this season's collections.At first sight, there was something that evoked the forties in the abbreviated, sober chic of the dresses and suits that marched down a long concrete runway that had been doused with water to look like a regular, nonglamorous street. In fact, Elbaz's cutting, with its bias wraps, drapes, subtle knots, and bunchy bows, owes little to retro and much more to enabling a modern woman to go about her business in a tough time. A sense of presence and energy comes into it—the fierce economy of style that boils down to a simple-seeming waisted silhouette, black gloves, pumps.Still, there is something here—and maybe this is the "Parisian" part—that refuses to sink into banal austerity. Elbaz's natural inclination is to make women feel happy—and that means sneaking plenty of sparkle into the seams from time to time, adding giant tubular neckpieces, and including considerately thought-out accessories like fur stoles sewn onto a loop, ready to pull on over…whatever. However, nothing at Lanvin ever comes at less than top price. In a tanking economy, that would seem to contradict Elbaz's stated aim to embrace "realism" and the generality of women's daily concerns. It all depends, though, how pennies are counted, how long clothes can be worn, and whether they're destined to be made obsolete by fashion within six months. With this collection, Elbaz deliberately built a defense against that lack of confidence, going back to re-do pieces (like the raw-edged charmeuse dresses) he first came up with five years ago. His message: What was good then is just as good now, and what's bought now can have just as much value years hence. In a year when all other financial investments look like a joke, a Lanvin one is as rock-solidly trustworthy as fashion can be.
5 March 2009
Riffing on the recession at a Lanvin pre-fall presentation, Alber Elbaz argued that looking glamorous is a feminine survival instinct. He's got a point. With the economic forecast as dire as it is, we may feel glum, but who wants to look it? There was a Jazz Age decadence to looks like a Wedgwood blue tulle cloud minidress, a patchworked fur cropped jacket, and a tiered and scalloped long lace dress with a bronze crystal underlay. But this designer knows the charms of the makeshift, too; the label's signature necklaces were laced together with velvet like "pieces from your grandmother's jewelry box." And since we can't all sit out the economic downturn at a Paris café smoking cigarettes and sipping Pernod, Elbaz gave equal play to day looks: A jersey dress was draped from a single piece of fabric, and a jacket came with an elasticized belt for shape so, he explained, "you don't look fat." Which, we all know, is just as important as looking glam.
12 January 2009
Can voluptuous fashion stay relevant in an age of austerity? Can gorgeous decoration coexist with the need for something plain and simple? Ask Alber Elbaz, a man whose recipe for reductionism and all-out gorgeousness squared the circle with a unique flourish. "Whatever's happening now," he said, "it's the end of fake. What's not real will go. What we have to do now is make life easier for women."To him, that meant going back to the studio with scissors and fabric and working out, first, a supreme economy of cut and design. Airy shapes in poufy gazar, duchesse satin, georgette, and cloque were crafted from single shots of color in one-shouldered tops, balloon-sleeved blouses, and shifts in which the only feature is an internal drape that adds a miraculously chic fillip to the hip line. To begin with, this calm focus on the intrinsic value of structure was shown with nude shoes, so the eye had nothing to distract it from noticing, say, the way external darts ran up the hip and into the waist of a cool pair of black pants. It was intellectual and reserved, a quintessence of Lanvin that only Elbaz can achieve.But suddenly, just before it all turned into a sober-sided treatise in form, the other side of Elbaz's brain kicked in. A mad blue leopard-spot dress with insane crystal-studded sunglasses and the hottest beaded and bejeweled high-heeled sandals advanced along the runway, and an outbreak of crazy high spirits took over. Ending the show with a gorgeous lineup of dresses in purple and blue fringed Lurex, crystal and knit embroidery, and random sprinklings of paillette flowers, Elbaz closed the season on a celebratory high. A counterintuitive moment, maybe, but it reflected something this designer understands as well as he does the principles of rational dressing: Even when times are dark, there's still room for clothes to make women keel over with desire.
4 October 2008
The last day of Europe's Spring menswear schedule belonged to Lanvin. Fair enough—Lucas Ossendrijver pioneered the pajama-easy languor that has been one of the season's biggest trends—but he wasn't resting on his laurels. The designer originally opted for a big-volume statement, but then he decided to inject a little tension into the collection by torturing the volume into something else. He did this, for instance, with the elastic that tightened cuffs and gave a blazer a blouson waistband. Ossendrijver also used pintucking, pleats, or ruching on the sleeves of a safari jacket, or on a pair of pants so narrow they might have been leggings. It was a way of giving the sinuous fabrics he favors a new movement.Elsewhere, he let the volume fly free in a leather trench, a nylon windbreaker, or a denim peacoat layered over denim shorts. They added a tough little fillip to a collection that otherwise was very much in the ambiguous vein that Ossendrijver and his mentor Alber Elbaz have made the signature of Lanvin's menswear. Hence, a tee beaded with a trompe l'oeil necklace effect, a male version of the faux tulle-mounted jewelry in Elbaz's womenswear. Or a matching jacket and top in a nubby black jacquard, or more of that clinging knitwear. The fabric sandals were also polymorphous (less so, the beaded high-tops). But this time around, Ossendrijver struck a faultless balance between the decadent and the divine. He claimed he was seeking "clothes with emotion." The rapturous response of the audience suggested he'd found them.
28 June 2008
For his joyful Resort collection for Lanvin, Alber Elbaz was thinking not only of the "idea of vacation" but also of the "perfect American [look] of the fifties—but made in the wrong way." That translated into off-kilter, asymmetrically draped pieces that seemed just right for the season: bias-cut skirts, slouchy pajama suits, scarf dresses, and unstructured cocktail numbers worn with scads of necklaces and embellished with a scattering of beads or sequin polka dots. Elbaz also unveiled his collaborative effort with Acne Jeans: Everything from shoes and bags to a leg-of-mutton-sleeved dress came in darkest denim, giving chic new life to the beloved workaday fabric.
15 June 2008
If there is one collection that encapsulated everything that's best about Fall—and gave it a high degree of personal expression—it would be Alber Elbaz's for Lanvin. You want the simplicity of a stark, covered-up, carved-out silhouette? It's here. You're craving a dose of multifaceted opulence with it? That's here, too. And what about a sexy, simple evening dress powerful enough to force you to spend, no matter how much? Look no further.In one way, Elbaz's collection was a feat of technical genius. He'd started off by making fabric out of strips of grosgrain ribbon, winding hundreds of meters of the stuff around the body to make shapely dresses, blouses, and skirts—a step on from the free-flowing plissés of his Summer collection. What makes him so special, however, is the humility and realism of his focus. Instead of getting lost in the detail, he said, "Part of a designer's job is to be pragmatic. Not to be ashamed to think about making life easy for a woman."The result was a tour de force of innovation and simplicity sparkled up with the most outrageously excessive jewelry—door knocker-sized crystals, slabs of gilt, giant cuffs. Every calibration of usefulness was represented, from plain wool work-ready day dresses and pantsuits through knockout fur and patent coats, asymmetric body-molding cocktail options right up to blindingly brilliant dresses made of vertical ribbons loaded with gold sequins. In a season when so many have anxiously cast around for what women will want in a recession, Elbaz has intuited the best answer of all: Give us restraint, give us pragmatism, but never slam the door on the possibility of utter gorgeousness.
1 March 2008
When he started work on Lanvin's menswear for fall, Lucas Ossendrijver knew he wanted to go in the opposite direction from the style that has made the collection a fashion editors' favorite. Previously, all the fabrics were washed to give the clothing a lived-in, louche character. Here, everything was crisp and defined, to fit a new structured silhouette: The double-breasted jacket of the suit that opened the show was almost boxy in the breadth of its shoulders. After the show, Ossendrijver talked about wanting to convey the idea of boys growing up too fast, so that their clothes were always too big or too small. (Raf Simons was also inspired by such moments of transition—do you think these mythical "boys" have any sense of the sway they hold over the vanguard of men's fashion?) Anyway, that notion determined the dimensions of jackets cut larger and trousers shrunk to fit just above the ankle, often with a ribbed cuff, like sweatpants. It was especially odd in a camel suit.The "grown-up" clothes—like a long, lean topcoat or a cardigan jacket (worn over a waistcoat, crisp white shirt, and flesh pink silk tie)—looked better. But tradition with a touch of iconoclasm has been a Lanvin signature since Ossendrijver started working under Alber Elbaz at the house, and here, it was simply the shapes that had changed. Elsewhere, he extended the dressy/casual dialogue with coats that wrapped with the ease of a bathrobe, and he pushed the technology of the collection with great success. A coat had the dull, rubbery sheen of neoprene, but it was actually one layer of silk wool bonded onto another. Despite the new structure, coats and jackets had a lightness that was achieved by removing linings, bonding the insides with jersey instead. It was lightness that also made a soft suede slip-on look fresher than the patent sneakers (though it wouldn't be a Lanvin show without a shiny shoe).
19 January 2008
Alber Elbaz gave the ladies what they want with his sophisticated pre-fall collection, which found the designer taking some of his favorite motifs—Grecian draping, a thirties sleeve, surface decoration—and pushing them just a little bit further. Raw-edged dresses, for instance, looked like simple slips from the front but came with ruffled backs. A satin-lined fur coat had a slouchy dishabille fit, and an exposed zipper fronted a don't-mess-with-me city coat. The muted palette, mainly black and gray (with shots of navy, teal, and forest green), let the eye linger on the shapes—both sculpted and draped.
16 January 2008
For lightness, technical brilliance, and sheer heart-racing excitement, Alber Elbaz's Spring collection was one of the most uplifting shows of the entire season. On a breeze, with nothing much more than a twist of polyester to hand, he captured fluidity, color, practicality, and a soaring kind of simplicity that caused a visceral response in every woman watching. To begin with, he brought the principles of goddess dressing to daywear, putting knee-length draped dresses under light, matching flyaway trenches in city-sober (yet utterly stunning) navy or khaki—Madame Grès gone techno. Elbaz's stand-alone dresses were masterpieces of cutting—seamless spirals, flowing trapezes, cool shifts magicked out of single lengths of material with maybe just a belt or a gathered drawstring for detail. "I have no words for it," he said, humbly. "I only wanted to start from instinct."Few words, indeed, are equal to describing the drama of the pleated dresses that ballooned into airborne trains in movement—one each in cobalt, green, yellow, and red—or the embellishment. Pale ostrich plumes worked their way up the front of a white chiffon sheath, puffing upward to one shoulder and tethered to the body with a weighty pearl-and-enamel pendant. Patches of crystal and feather embroidery, almost African, were worked into intensely patterned shimmy dresses fit for a modern Josephine Baker. And the color kept on exploding on the retina: magenta, teal, red, coral, purple. By the finale parade, Elbaz had covered tux dressing, togas, shirts, pencil skirts, and even some of the season's best fluid pants. When he came out to take his bow, there was a roar of applause from the audience—recognition that this triumph was Elbaz's best Lanvin collection to date, and a celebration that, at long last, someone had come up with the insight to make a collection that is about enhancing the quality of women's lives today.
7 October 2007
Alber Elbaz jetted to New York to lead intimate presentations of Lanvin's cruise offerings. In the lineup were plenty of his precious evening numbers, in either black tulle accented with ribbons or white silk embellished with pearls and other oversize beads. For day, he showed a thick-gauge knit skirt suit that was literally gold-dipped, and a creamy coat with jewels for buttons. But predictable this minishow was not. Elbaz used the face time with editors and buyers to introduce new offerings. These included 22 Faubourg, an item-y collection of T-shirts, scarves, and even luggage decorated with his drawings, as well as a range of cashmere and silk loungewear and sleepwear for the Lanvin fan who has everything. Last but not least, he showed off a group of nontraditional wedding dresses. There wasn¿t a poufy gown to be seen. Instead, Elbaz reinterpreted some of his hits—bubbles, tiers of tulle, skimmy sheaths—in bridal white and ivory.
9 July 2007
Alber Elbaz claimed that Lanvin's new menswear collection wasn't for fashion victims. "It's not fashion, it's a wardrobe," he insisted. And if that implies everything from pajamas to tuxes, then Alber wasn't far wrong. Especially about the pajamas. That's because his cohort Lucas Ossendrijver's declared intention was to give tailored menswear the fluid ease of languid bedwear. Maybe it was this ambience of the boudoir infecting the entire collection that was responsible for the sensuality of the clothes.The overwhelming impression was shiny silkiness, from the first outfits (a chalk-toned trench layered over a blouson, say) to the last (a silky bib over a jersey shirt in an eveningwear collage). Even the polo shirts were silk, with little faux bow ties like Mickey Mouse ears. Such sinuous looks defied structure, so a shirt-jacket tucked casually into pants, another shirt-jacket layered easily between a jacket and shirt. And a djellaba was easiest of all. It underscored the fundamental exoticism of the Lanvin proposition, which adds a little twist of irony to the ardor this collection stirs in the bosoms of the international menswear media. It's as though Elbaz and Ossendrijver have given suited-and-booted "real" men a license to be louche (and what better entry point than Lanvin's exquisite metallic footwear?). But that knit pantsuit looked like Judy Garland redux from last season. You gotta love it!
30 June 2007
"After last season," explained Alber Elbaz, "we sat in the studio and asked ourselves, 'Where do you go after futurism?' And someone said to me, 'You want to go home.' So then I went back and started looking at Jeanne Lanvin's sketches again." What Elbaz came across was a sheaf of illustrations of Lanvin's wide-shouldered thirties gowns and that was enough to set him off on a path of intense cutting research, which led to one of the strongest advances in modern dressing to come out of the Paris shows. "It's all in the sleeve," he said.Technical construction details sound dull on paper, and too often designerly innovation ends up beyond the realm of the sanely wearable. But in pushing his broad-shouldered look, Elbaz applied both scissors and his sensitivity to most women's morbid fears about its last go-round, viz., the Sue Ellen eighties. His solution is an aerated shoulder volume without pads, something akin to a leg-of-mutton, but actually without historical precedent. It came on washed duchesse-satin shifts, belted jackets, techno-nylon coats, and a delicious ivory charmeuse blouse.That striking silhouette formed the core of the collection, but Elbaz didn't leave it there. His other contribution to the growing desire for concise but luxurious design (we have to think of something to call it other than minimalism) was in dresses that were sexily wrapped from single lengths of fabric. Often deceptively sober in front, they draped through the hip and got caught up in back with an asymmetric frill running the length of the spine, or turned to show a little upthrust scroll of peplum in the small of the back.As for the out-and-out-luxe side of Lanvin, which so many women adore, Elbaz had that well covered. Some of his rigorous sleeveless dresses had the darts and seams picked out in jewels, and then there were the furs, ingeniously calculated to deconstruct into separate vests, scarves, and techno-look undercoats. This is smart thinking from so many angles that its true ingenuity can only be appreciated in front of a mirror in a changing room. And that, really, is how Alber Elbaz likes to speak to women—rather than from the lofty vantage point of the runway.
3 March 2007
The lingering impression at a fashion show is often the music. At Lanvin, for instance, the mix of Siouxsie and strings was the aural embodiment of the collection's mash-up of the edgy and the classic. One outfit stood out above all others: a tracksuit in gold duchesse satin. It was designer Lucas Ossendrijver's reconceptualization of a man's suit. "Masculine but not macho, a certain fragility without becoming feminine," was how he put it after the show. The same notion presumably inspired the show's closer, a pantsuit in coral knit that stirred up an outré echo of Judy Garland. But that's what has made Lanvin's menswear such an editors' favorite. It has a curious, ever-so-slightly camp fearlessness.Ossendrijver wanted to push that skewed spirit farther in this collection. The styling and accessories—a knit tie, hot-pink high-tops—helped make his point. So did the more extreme color palette and the more defined silhouettes. "The only things I can wear in this collection are the ties and shoes," laughed Alber Elbaz, Lanvin's cuddly creative director. True, the legging-slim trousers and leanly tailored jackets and coats might pose a challenge for Alber, but there was other outerwear that brimmed with generosity, particularly a gray knit duffel coat and a parka with its hem gathered to create the couture-ish tulip shape that has crossed over to menswear this season.
27 January 2007
Lanvin closed the spring collections with the strongest marshaling of purposefully honed modernity Alber Elbaz has ever sent down a runway. Ditching the surreal, fifties-flavored illusionism of his last collection, this was a personal departure, with the emphasis on linear pantsuits, high-tech gleam, and real-world usage over his more familiar fuzzy-focus romanticism. More than that, Elbaz's highly specific version of futurism (or, rather, looking at things as they are, right now) seemed like a comment on the corporate-versus-creative conflicts that have been scattering fashion all over the place this spring. "When you're stuck, you go romantic," is how the designer put it. "With freedom of spirit, you can go further. I wanted to touch technology, engineering, silicone, nylon, metal, and plastic. And a new place for the pragmatic."Elbaz works for a relatively small, privately owned label (thus the "freedom") but has a disproportionately large influence in driving fashion one way or the other. So when Lanvin shoots for a tougher, shinier, more high-powered vision of womanhood, it's a point of view that will be taken in parallel with the ideas from that other small-but-roaring powerhouse, Balenciaga. In Elbaz's hands, it wasn't so Robo-woman; more a matter of a dozen workings of futuristic Greek draping with athletic multistrap racer backs, along with leather or metallic skinny pantsuits with a flying-uniform edge, and parachute silk zipper-detailed shifts and trenches in acid yellow, pink, or pale khaki.Still, the real difference here was that—apart from a couple of too-literal, spacey moments—Elbaz didn't project his woman fully into a brave new world. He is one of the few designers who seem to remember that we are still earthlings who serve in offices and quite like (once past 25) to get out at night in something other than a baby doll. This collection, with its lean tailoring and its plethora of crunched silk or slithery, form-skimming silk or charmeuse-draped dresses, made either reality look like a pleasurable proposition.
7 October 2006
The comfort factor of Alber Elbaz's womenswear for Lanvin has been such a huge asset to the label that it makes perfect sense that, along with his menswear lieutenant, Lucas Ossendrijver, he would carry over the same principle here. That's why everything was washed in Lanvin's latest collection for men. It meant things looked soft and worn, which fit with the general vintage feel of the clothes. The starting point was the ultimate male ensemble—the military uniform—and that translated into little epauletted jackets and side-striped trousers. Suits had the compact smartness of a cadet's uniform, which gave the collection a skinny, boyish flair, also evident in a fitted, zippered blouson and a trench with an elasticized waist.A little drama was created by the fundamental oppositions within outfits: shiny vs. matte, fitted vs. loose, natural vs. synthetic. But the starkest contrast was in the accessories: Jetson-styled sunglasses and shoes in gaudy metallics. Ossendrijver said he thought of them as the male equivalent of jewelry. Potential retailers were enchanted.
4 July 2006
Last time around, Alber Elbaz's fierce, streamlined, high-platformed collection raced ahead of the season, igniting a lady-versus-power-woman debate that has only just burst into flame on other runways. For fall, Elbaz turned away from that thought to engage in a less obviously agenda-setting round of small talk: the conversation about the legacies of midcentury haute couture houses that is currently mesmerizing many Parisian designers.Thus, the collection picked up Christian Dior's New Look (hip-padding), Cristobal Balenciaga's volumes (flounced tent dresses and swing-back coats), Elsa Schiaparelli's surrealism (illusion effects), and Saint Laurent's pantsuits (tuxedo dressing). That set Elbaz up for a challenge: how to modernize those shapes, and how to meld them into the empathetic, wardrobe-building style that has been his personal gift to the modern Lanvin woman.When he concentrated on easy-to-wear party dresses, Elbaz was on home territory. His ballerina-like numbers of draped tulle on nude backgrounds, a black silhouette with an inverted triangle for a top and a full skirt below, and slim black dresses with bright satin folds inserted into the front were all in that lovely vein. Elbaz's inventive jewelry—big neckpieces made from crystal and gem-set teardrops of jersey—also put him in a category of his own.Elsewhere, though, the designer's more-intellectual experiments with form could end up leading him into an uncharacteristic collision with women's sensitivities. Those who dress to avoid broadness of beam and kindly inquiries of "When's it due?" may not leap to invest in molded, stand-out hips or dresses that swing (out, and out again) from the shoulder. Still, this collection held out a lot that was less assertively "fashion"-conscious—like the smoking looks and some great coats. These constitute the kind of personal, under-the-radar chic that makes women rave about Elbaz, even when he's not in ground-breaking mode.
4 March 2006
Seeing that Jeanne Lanvin was the first designer to create a collection for men, this could technically be viewed as a relaunch. But the house's current creative force, Alber Elbaz, also saw it as an opportunity to lay down some fresh guidelines. "We know Italian, we know English, but French style is still an abstract idea to men," he observed. He imagined "something chic, not aggressive—a white shirt with pearl buttons, cashmere pajamas to go to sleep, a smoking in knitwear." And he paraded all of those items through a salon in the suitably elegant Hôtel de Crillon.There was a distinct Alber-ness to the attitude of the show—not just styling touches like the bowties and trainers, but the general floppiness and lived-in feel of the clothes. This latter quality has been one of Elbaz's unique selling points with the popular women's collection he designs for Lanvin. Just as there, the dresses have a story to tell; here, the way outfits were composed evoked a specific mood. They suggested a man who embodies ease and eccentricity in equal amounts (much like Elbaz himself).The formality of frock coats and jackets with tux detailing was diffused by the languor of trousers in gold velvet or burgundy satin. The Lanvin man can do sobriety when he needs to in his gray flannel suit or long navy coat, but a cardigan over a scoop-neck top, or a hoodie under a jacket, or those cashmere pajamas hinted at the easygoing sensualist within. This is French style viewed through a very particular filter.
7 February 2006
Who'd have guessed that Alber Elbaz, the man who bestowed soft decorative dressing on the world two years ago, would be the first to break away into a new, fiercely exciting minimalism? That was what he achieved for spring: a rigorous, couture-informed reengineering of clothes for women who spend more time striding out in the world than simpering at cocktail parties."Modernity is always in a rush," he said of his speedily zipped-up narrow skirts, shirts, and ties; kimono-derived dresses; and tapered pants, pulled in with wide patent or elastic belts. The subtleties (because minimalism can never again mean a matte black sheath) were in the looping drape of a back view, the folded bands pressed flat into the front of a dress, suggesting obis, and the textures: washed satin, gazar, and an extraordinary scarlet metal-thread material with the 3-D appearance of velvet, crunched into a luxurious Lanvin trench.Still, the place where Elbaz's brilliant flash of insight really starts is at the feet. He knows we know life always looks better viewed atop a fantastic pair of shoes. Lanvin's red, turquoise, emerald, and yellow patent platforms are killer-class accessories that up confidence and dramatically alter proportions. If Elbaz drew, as always, on his old-school training in couture methods for the clothes, it was auto components that inspired him to think, he said, of "designing shoes like varnished cars—like a Cadillac!" One of the best examples had a high conical heel, a thick platform, and two python straps, one white, one navy. It showed exactly how a designer as influential as Elbaz can make the decisive difference between what went on six months ago and what's right now. Genius.
8 October 2005
Following a golden blockbuster of a season is a tough challenge for any designer to face. Being sandwiched between two other major shows on the same day—the tense Olympic sprint to the end of an outstanding Paris season—put Alber Elbaz in an even more competitive spot for fall. So where did he place? Well, considerably handicapped by the lack of top models (most were prebooked by Louis Vuitton and YSL), and showing in spartan conditions, Lanvin took the silver.He did extraordinary coats, starting with an orange textured velvet in his familiar full-skirt look, and introduced new shapes in stricter black, including a knife-narrow version of his now classic taffeta raincoat. A sexily shaped jacket that appeared as part of black pencil skirt suit, and then in a gorgeous white panne velvet, will inspire women on the hunt for fall chic. As for Elbaz's best-selling dresses, there were plenty, ranging from a newly sober high-neck, long-sleeve black velvet number to more familiarly dainty styles in layered chiffons and plissé tulle, as well as high-waist ballerina dresses.Each of those pieces explains why Elbaz belongs to a superelite of fashion frontrunners who are leaving most other collections in the distance. But this was a presentation that, while giving an airing of all the things women love about Lanvin, somehow didn't quite clinch the drama of a top-rated show. The demerits were some oddly judged styling devices (pale ballet slippers that made some girls look as if they were barefoot), a lack of focus in the editing, and some apparently random surprises: two boldly colorful flowered dresses with mismatched floral coats. Perhaps they were indications of the way this extraordinary designer will take fashion next, and in that way, they have intriguing potential. But, like the rest of the show, they didn't quite move the label forward enough to make this season one of Elbaz's truly memorable spectaculars.
5 March 2005
Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz can turn even a broken wrist that prevented him from sketching to creative advantage. "In the studio I found I could only make big gestures to describe what I wanted," he said. "And that turned into all this volume and weightlessness." The results included generous skirts and puffy silhouettes, drenched in exquisite hues ranging from intense violet through sophisticated neutrals—a beautifully shaded demonstration of Elbaz's growing insight into howlovelycan also meanrealistic.Let's face it: A full skirt is not, under normal circumstances, easy on the hip. Elbaz sorted that out by running his silk faille and gazar through the washing machine—a transformation that eliminated the dreaded bulk and put air in a gather, bounce in a flounce. He also makes things simple to put on, as evidenced by the sleeveless mauve dress that blossomed below the waist, or the trench cut to swing out in a glorious swirl.Still can't go there? No worries. Elbaz also knows how to do slim, chiefly by way of Greek pleats—either along the lines of Madame Grès' refined, ribbon-bound couture version or, with brilliant freshness, the flowy rivulets of Mariano Fortuny's tunics. Bless him for making them as easy to pull on as a T-shirt.Decoration? He's thought of that, too. There were strands of pearl tied up in ribbon or studded with blue stones, and coin or brass-bobble embellishment applied to jackets or integrated into shirts—fancy stuff, but made totally today. Which precisely summed up the talent that brought this designer such a roar of appreciation at the end of his show.
9 October 2004
Alber Elbaz has been putting an inordinate amount of thought into making his vision of glamorous dressing an easy, relevant proposition for modern women. The most striking example came midway through his show, when an elegant twisted loop in the back of a short black silk dress was unpinned to fall from the shoulder, transforming itself into a starkly simple train. Every woman in the audience got this immediately: Two fabulous dresses for the price of one.There were other such devices, like a kind of draped silk apron that untied to leave a bare shift beneath, or a gray sheath that came with a couple of removable net layers. For day, there were vests that could be worn over or under coats, and detachable shirt collars and cuffs to pop into dresses according to mood and occasion.More simply, Elbaz reprised some of the elements that have brought him a growing following (a wide age span of fans that includes both Kate Moss and Gretchen Leach, wife of the American ambassador to France, both sitting front row.) The collection featured his taffeta trenches, the satin ribbon details he's made his own, a slew of his signature dresses, and his much-copied use of jewelry. He pinned slightly antiqued crystal flower brooches on day dresses and popped shredded chiffon roses in buttonholes; evening saw a reprise of his sparkling ribbon-backed neckpieces, now grown into long multiple strands. Still, it was the simplest of his dress ideas that stood out as the most modern and provocative: a white satin tank dress, knotted up the side with bows, slipped under a glamorous cloud of tufty, gray-tipped fox.
6 March 2004
For spring, Alber Elbaz abandoned his concern with intricate surfaces and dainty jeweling. Instead, like several other designers in Paris, he went back to the drawing board of couture fundamentals in an effort to pull something modern-looking out of old-school methods. His particular focus for Lanvin was seamless draping, possibly the trickiest of all technical challenges. Elbaz also grasped at the slippery subject of slinky, thirties-era glamour—something that has emerged as a preoccupation of the season. Some of it worked, but not on every level.The designer wrapped satin and taffeta around the body, with the edges of the fabric tied in loose, flat bows or emerging as bustles, ripples along spine lines, or asymmetric flicks flying out from the side of a dress. To emphasize the flow, surface detail was limited to two devices for holding everything in place: strategically placed hooks and eyes, and flat metal snaps. Edges were left raw.The problem with this apparent simplicity is that it calls more attention to the aesthetic decisions made about color, accessories, and other intangibles of styling. Some of the dresses in silver or bronze sequins, with their twisted plunge necklines, looked effortlessly divine and right in step with the season. Ditto the pieces in lingerie-pale pink, coral, or peacock-blue satin. Yet Elbaz only demonstrated how hard it is to do charmeuse (and charm) when he brought on searing yellow, royal blue, or emerald, and his treatment of flashy gold sequins was equally jarring. What also escaped were crucial incidentals like footwear that can make a collection coalesce (knee-high black spiked boots, for example, clunked). Close up, there were many extraordinary items; but now Elbaz needs to mold and edit his technique to an image that's completely satisfying.
11 October 2003
There aren’t many designers in the world who can handle the feminine and the refined without looking dated and chichi. But Alber Elbaz, at Lanvin, is one of the few capable of pushing delicate classicism toward an inspiring new edge. Declaring that he “wanted to do something beautiful that reflects what’s going on around us,” he took extravagant materials—satin ribbon, Chantilly lace, couture-grade silk, python and fur—and worked them alongside the more modern, disciplined look of exposed zippers and ribbed jersey.Elbaz’s defining looks included neat black waisted knee-length dresses made of vertical lengths of ribbon invisibly set on strips of tulle; as the models walked, the narrowness of the silhouette broke into a gorgeous fan. The ribbon motif ran throughout the collection, sometimes flattened into an asymmetric bow on the front of a jacket or the derri¿re of a skirt. Exquisite knife-edge pleating turned up in a lipstick-red dress, a strict belted coat swinging into a plissé skirt, and as glamorous detail in the back vent of an ultrachic black taffeta trench with ribbon-tied cuffs.The ladylike-meets-military feel was at its most focused when the decorative haberdashery got worked into ribbed knit zippered suits. A fur sweater with a zipper in the shoulder marched over tight pants tucked into black boots. After that came a slew of little cocktail dresses, some made entirely in black lace, others as sheaths of geometric bugle beading or distressed silver sequin. Crafted with extraordinary skill, the collection was another step in the reevaluation of charm and luxury that is shaping up as fashion’s newest movement.
8 March 2003
Bouquets are due Alber Elbaz for excellent taste and innovative design aimed directly at the sophisticated women of the world. His spring collection for Lanvin was a rare vision of luxurious dressing, balancing luster with rawness in a grown-up, wearable way.Elbaz composed the collection from four basic elements: rough-woven linen and gauzes, black satin ribbon, crystal jewelry and a color palette that ran from browns through bronze to dull gold. He started by taking on the difficult and much-neglected day suit, modernizing it by doing unlined, slubby jackets and skirts, leaving the edges raw and putting sheer blouses decorated with crystal and sequins underneath. The beauty was in the narrowness of the cut and the put-together look: flat Roman sandals made from satin ribbon, and hair pulled back in high buns and covered in black silk scarves, twinkling with a cool adaptation of the tiara. The designer also has a genius for dresses, which came in many variations on the goddess theme. The most exciting had clear silicone straps and what appeared to be integral jewelry at the neckline, creating the illusion that the whole garment was suspended by magic from the naked shoulder. Other evening options came in liquid gold satin and in a terra-cotta African-influenced print.As a collection, Lanvin was a highly considered—and considerate—piece of work, executed with an impressive degree of respect for real women.
5 October 2002
With his first collection for Lanvin, Alber Elbaz successfully walked the finest of lines between design panache and desirable, grown-up clothes. Leaving a chic margin of raw edge on the most luxurious of fabrics, and cutting a beautiful compromise between the fierce and the feminine, he pulled off a feat of styling that augurs well for the future.Elbaz opened his show with a dark brown, double-face coat with an irregular cascade of sequin running down the front. It was a signal that quality would be honored, but also energized with a shot of free-form creativity. That thread was developed via wrapper coats in, for example, slubby brown tweed with an unfinished edge running down the front, and in the way he frayed the edges of what might otherwise have been a matronly combination of a camelhair cape and dress. Elbaz’s sequence of chiffon dresses in subtle washes of neutral color were beautifully done, bound with multiple leather belts and held on by effortlessly complex twists and knots in the shoulder details. With their unhemmed edges—and especially when they were shown with high, pointy distressed leather spat-boots—they channeled ballerinas and pagan goddesses (and perhaps Claire McCardell) without seeming in the least bit fey.Elbaz spanned luxe and casual by showing how good fur can look if worn simply with a gray tracksuit and high heels. He also cleverly put immaculate oversize overcoats over matching pantsuits with a mannish cut—a subtle reference to Lanvin’s identity as a successful seller of men’s suits. This was an optimistic start to a new chapter in Elbaz’s career (he was formerly at Guy Laroche, YSL Rive Gauche, and Krizia) and he was loudly applauded for it.
9 March 2002
Cristina Ortiz went for a tougher-than-usual feeling at Lanvin, restricting her palette to black, navy blue and off-white.To a rock-and-roll soundtrack, Ortiz sent out long coats with half-hidden belts, low-button mannish jackets, teensy black dresses with side slits and blazers with upturned, silver-studded lapels. Ortiz was intent on making a statement with sheer fabrics, unexpected cutouts and dramatic details like neck bands that trailed down the arm and reattached themselves at the cuff.Her experiments often worked well. A petrol-blue trench was striking, and several minidresses looked sharp and sexy. On the other hand, some of Ortiz's slashed tops and self-consciously punky looks seemed a bit forced and contrived. The clean, simple silhouettes worked best.
10 March 2001
Lanvin designer Cristina Ortiz reworked the season's loose, sexy silhouette in a simple palette of white, tan, black, pink and red. Billowy short dresses, paillette-trimmed off-the-shoulder blouson tops and tab-collar shirts with keyhole cutouts played up the current cocktail-dressing motif. Beaded bell tops were paired with fitted knee-length skirts, and simple pantsuits were worn with masculine shirts.Ortiz's designs were in tune with the fashion moment, but parts of her collection seemed overly derivative. The studded skirts and dresses with a woman's face on them brought to mind Chloé's embroidered looks; the diamente plunging bodysuits and the edging on white trousers were at times reminiscent of Loewe. Ortiz's collection was well cut, but the house of Lanvin has yet to develop a strong personal identity under her creative direction.
7 October 2000
"Pretty" is not a word that has been flying freely at the collections this season, but it is just the effect that Cristina Ortiz achieved at Lanvin. Her light-handed collection wafted along like a breath of sweet-scented fresh air after all of this week's smoky nightclub ambience.Ortiz softened her hard geometry of past seasons, but continued to draw on graphic Art Deco motifs that referenced the slightly theatrical clothes that made Jeanne Lanvin a fashion star in the '20s. In Ortiz's sophisticated hands, and with her intriguing color mixes, the effects were never old-fashioned.A jigsaw patchwork of lozenge-shapes, embroidered in silk or beads, resembled the work of Jean Dunand, the great '20s decorative artist. Ortiz used the patchwork in African colors for a stiff A-line skirt, or as a giant "kipper" tie, knotted over a black chiffon blouse. A sweater of sheared fur was crafted in color-shaded chevrons; a chiffon skirt or blouse had a whirlpool effect of swirling panels in beige, cocoa and sky. A Barbie-pink satin blouse, worn with peach chiffon bootleg pants, was an exclamation point of color. And Ortiz introduced subtle traces of gold—as in the borders on a skinny biscuit-colored fur bomber jacket; the hip-slung belt on a chiffon dress in ice-cream tones of coffee, framboise, lemon and peach; and in the platform-heeled golden sandals, their gilded soles flashing prettily as the high-stepping mannequins stalked the runway.
1 March 2000
Cristina Ortiz presented a subtle yet striking collection for Lanvin, with her famously slim, sleek trousers taking center stage. They were done in black, lilac, red and cocoa, in fabrics ranging from canvas to leather to coated cotton. The highlight was a stunning beaded pair that faded from hazelnut to green. Ortiz also created sharp leather jackets, fitted shirtdresses, and practical jacquard dresses with ruched necks and waistlines. For her finale, Ortiz sent out a series of colorful evening gowns with appliqués resembling glittering broken tiles.
6 October 1999