Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Miu Miu bring Paris Fashion Week to a close with some important takeaways.
The Miu Miu show on the last day of fashion month opened with an art installation — Art Basel Paris starts in about two weeks — featuring a piece by Goshka Macuga, the Polish-born, London-based artist.
Titled “Salt Looks Like Sugar,” it transformed the runway space into a newspaper printing plant, with issues of a tabloid called the Truthless Times hanging from conveyor belts that ran across the ceiling as videos of two employees played on the walls. All to illustrate the ambiguity of what a precis called a “post-truth era” and issues like: What is fact? What is fiction? What is fashion?
OK, not the latter. That wasn’t part of the piece. But it could have been.
The question of what style is going to look like next is always the underlying theme of collections, as is a certain breast-beating about the bubblelike point of it all, but rarely have there been as few answers as there have been over the past few weeks. Instead there’s been a lot of spinning in place, archive-diving (when in doubt, look to the past!) and breath-holding. A lot of big shows and big celebrities, signifying … not much.
You can understand it, in the case of a brand like Chanel, which is between artistic directors and currently being created by the design team. The brand is literally in limbo, so defaulting to the known — jolie madame bouclé skirt suits in black and white, flowing floral chiffons — makes sense.
Especially when dressed up by a command performance from Riley Keough, a house ambassador, who serenaded the crowd with a rendition of “When Doves Cry” while swinging in a giant bird cage, a nod to Vanessa Paradis’ famous 1991 Chanel ad. But even more broadly speaking, when no one knows what is going to happen next, it’s hard to predict how to dress next.
