Jean Colonna (Q3182)

“I wanted a little chaos,” saidJean Colonna, handing a reviewer a glass of homemade lemonade as he walked through his Spring collection. Chaos, as it turns out, is seriously underrated. For one thing, it helps shake up “this bourgeois movement in our society that is more and more like having a pillow on your face, more and more difficult to breathe,” said Colonna. And he didn't mean any of that sexy kind of struggling, either. His aim was to critique our obsession with perfection by cutting and tearing it to pieces. He took scissors to some of his cult favorite lightweight cashmere tops and let machines shred others. Many of his designs carried metallic sequins, strategic slashes, strips of snakeskin, or a combination of the three.Some of his classics were here too. And they were uncut: various weights and lengths of silk and cashmere knits in balletic neutrals and inky black, as well as a miraculous pair of black pants that, thanks to tailoring, managed to be snugly mid-waisted and seem low-slung at the same time. These were shown to their best advantage by a slouchy, chic, and impossibly Parisian Camille Bidault Waddington—a stylist, fashion consultant, and photographer who, despite running in similar circles for the past 20 years, had only met Colonna a few days earlier. He had asked her, off the cuff, to style and star in his spring lookbook. He gave her free rein, he explained. He had wanted nothing else to do with it. (Making the garments was enough.) “In fashion you have three lives,” the designer said. “The fashion show that you did with your team, the interpretation of the journalist, and the garments in the shop.” Waddington’s take was yet another life—closest to the one that a consumer might experience, which is to say, closest to reality. She saw the clothes at 2:00 p.m., said Colonna, posed at 2:30, and handed over the digital images soon thereafter. It wasn’t quite chaos, Colonna conceded. But it was close enough.