La Parisienne

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March 5, 2013 PARIS By Tim Blanks There was no way to slot the ten outfits that were shown as Alexander McQuee's Fall collection into the general spectrum of the season. The handful of looks (really, it was five, plus a variant of each) was created while Sarah Burton was in the last stages of pregnancy. The precedents for such a situation in fashion are few and far between. Phoebe? Stella? Burton's aesthetic has always been much more convoluted than her peers anyway, so the extraordinary circumstance in which she found herself just amplified something that was already there. That something first appeared in her pre-fall collection, with its focus on the humble piety of Low Church Anglicans. Quite why this should occur to Burton as the genesis of a fashion collection is the sort of divine inspiration that is best left to her and her maker. But its elevation to the full-blown extravagance of the ten looks shown here perversely made a lot more sense. If pre-fall was about humility and purity, Fall nailed the excesses of Catholicism in a way that would have warmed the heart of ferocious anti-papist Lee. Burton divided the ten into five subgroups: Communion, nuns, cardinals, popes, and angels. In a scarcely believable but timely twist for McQueen, Britain's most senior Catholic cardinal has just stepped down in the wake of one of those sex scandals that endlessly plague the Vatican in the twilight of its domain. Burton coincidentally garbed her cardinal duo in outfits that would have done a Vegas showgirl—or a cross-dressing cleric—proud. And, bearing in mind the about-to-be-well-documented propensity of clergymen for outré behavior, she dressed her papal twosome as right royal queens of the British Isles. It was a brief but glorious pageant, staged in the appropriately OTT Opéra Comique, with all the subversive glee that one could wish to be attached to a McQueen attack on the propriety of church and state. The technique was obsessive to a fault—two weeks per outfit, ventured one awestruck source. Backstage, the models loomed head and shoulders above the minions fluttering around them. As they idly contemplated their pearl knuckle-dusters and languidly sipped sodas through the cages that framed their faces, they could scarcely have known that their gilded perfection was the most sublimely punkish assault on orthodoxy. So that's what's on a girl's mind when she's having twins.

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Miuccia Prada is typically less outspoken about the fashion fatigue induced by producing two major collections per season than, say, her pal Marc Jacobs, who has taken to wearing his pajamas around town — at Miu Miu, he was still sporting the ones in which he took his Vuitton bow. But even Prada is not immune to the grind. When prompted for the requisite inspiration sound bite after the show, the designer began by saying that her phenomenal Prada collection ate into her mental space for Miu Miu. “After the last show, having worked so much for a month and a half [on Prada], I just wanted the visual,” she said. “Something sporty but it had to become frivolous and romantic at the end. The end is completely another story, but I didn’t have time to analyze it. It’s just instinct and what you see.” If she was pressed for time or drained of creative energy, it didn’t show on the runway, where impulse drove her to a great, new-for-Miu Miu silhouette of long coats and sweaters worn over longer skirts that revealed the ankle. The look seemed rooted in conservative, early 1900s nostalgia, on which Prada riffed with a deft mix of serious fashion and cartoon madness. One ensemble — a fitted black jacket with big round buttons and orange astrakhan collar, worn over a polka-dot skirt with an orange ostrich carpet bag and silver Mary Janes — brought to mind Mary Poppins. The outerwear-skirt pairings, which went on to include terrific clingy ribbed knits zipped over striped skirts in combinations of red and black or yellow and black, triggered a memory of Jean Paul Gaultier in the Eighties. But there was plenty of Prada’s own history, too, in the sporty jackets and belted bodices cut out of quilted navy-blue nylon with pronounced zippers, big pockets and ribbed knit cuffs and hems. The adorably clownish motifs that were used sparingly as styling effects at first, escalated to full looks by the finale of chicly cut coats in pink, yellow and baby blue. Source: wwd.com

March 6, 2013 PARIS By Nicole Phelps It was hard to stifle an eye roll when Elie Saab's smoke machine hissed awake at the start of his show today. After four solid weeks of shows, the fashion crowd is over stunts. The good news is, once the smoke cleared, Saab's runway was gimmick free. He's got his formula and he sticks to it. Strictly Decorative, he called the show, but that applied mostly to his daywear, which had a somewhat regimental feel in navy and black. There was sleek tailoring in crepe satin, and a few take-no-prisoners sheaths with waist-accentuating peplums topped by fitted jackets. A sweeter pinafore dress with a full skirt looked out of place among all that rigor. For evening, Saab softened things up, adding colors like teal blue, violet, and chartreuse yellow to his lineup of white and black, and, as is his custom, laying on the sequins and beads. Picking up where his couture collection left off, he experimented with sheer tulle insets and peekaboo laces, which meant that while the silhouettes were modest, the results were still quite suggestive. Among the finer pieces was a demure cocktail dress in black lace with varying degrees of transparency, and a full-skirted black gown with an embroidered lace bodice and sleeves.

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Christian Dior S/S 1989 VogueSpirit scan Source: Top Models Of The World

Renato Balestra S/S 1988 VogueSpirit Scan Source: Top Models Of The World

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