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Paris Fashion Week: A surprise sacking

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Oct 14, 2008

By Lisa Armstrong

Valentino

Something odd is going on at a house that, until last year, had had the same designer at its helm for more than four decades. On Valentino's retirement the company announced that he would be replaced by Alessandra Facchinetti, 36. Eyebrows were raised, then lowered, when she produced a warmly received debut ready-to-wear collection in March and an even more enthusiastically received haute couture one in July.

So far, so encouraging. Except that after the Valentino show at the weekend she was fired, to be replaced, according to a statement from the house, by Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli, accessories designers at Valentino for the past decade. This is an eerie echo of Facchinetti's experience at Gucci, where she was sacked after two seasons and succeeded by Gucci's accessory designer. To add to the humiliation, Facchinetti says she learnt of her dismissal from journalists. Then Valentino himself weighed in: “[Chiuri and Piccioli] always demonstrated an enormous respect and love for my work. There is an existing archive with thousands of dresses from which they can draw and take inspiration to create a Valentino product that is relevant today. It is a shame their predecessor didn't feel this need.” Oh dear: updating a brand is never easy, especially when the founder is very much around. As for Facchinetti's collection? It continued her respectful yet modernising journey, but may never hit the shops.

Chanel
What's it like to have earned so much money by the age of 18 that you need never work again? Perhaps you get sudden urges to buy a white quilted-leather guitar case, or tights that have been artfully spun to look like, well, tights, but ones with built-in cycling shorts.

If so, Emma Watson, sitting in the front row at Chanel, was in the right place. Karl Lagerfeld is the maestro of the barmy accessory. Having had more than 20 years in which to learn that you don't mess with the label's bouclé tweed suit, he let rip with accessories. Half of them are jokes (or one assumes that they are, then finds that there's a waiting list for them in Manila, or they've become an ironic statement in Dalston). So don't be surprised if you see Chanel carrier bags in all the magazines come spring, because they swung down the catwalk, in paper or leather, it was hard to tell. Those clear plastic courts with black toecaps may be big, too, and the lattice-work anklebootswill probably do nicely. As for the monochromatic clothes: suits, with looser, boxier jackets; a T-shirt-shaped tunic dress in tweed. As for ruffles, they were central to evening wear: big bouncy tiers in metallic silks that brought to mind the ebullient glamour of 1930s Hollywood.

Yves Saint Laurent

Here's a peculiar thing. Do you see the black skirt pictured on the right? It's not actually a skirt. It's a, well, what, exactly? A tirt? Skousers?

For Stefano Pilati - the person responsible for this winter's seven-eighths-length trouser craze - has taken another leap into the dark and put a collection on an enormous Paris catwalk that revolves mainly around dhotis, some with crotches at the thigh, others with crotches at the ankle. That's quite a statement. A large section of the audience, normally Pilati disciples, couldn't take it. Nor - and this is the really spooky part - could the camera. I have looked and looked through the pictures for one that clearly demonstrates the dhoti connection but, time and again, the camera makes every single outfit look like a conventional skirt - which is handy really, because that's pretty much how they will appear in the stores, once the buyers have had their say.

So what was really new about Pilati's collection? The return of the bare upper midriff, perhaps. Those caged ankle boots, another erotic frisson to set the tills chirping. Or those thigh-length wrap jackets worn over peg trousers or calf-length skirts.

These aren't easy proportions on anyone, but among the challenges were some rather lovely, relatively simple, kimonoinspired shapes in inkly blues, black and khaki. As the burgundy sheer sequined dress pictured above suggests, no one can currently touch Pilati when it comes to producing something that looks both sedate and rather sick (and I mean that in a nice way).

Chloe

Not that the fashion world is anything like The Devil Wears Prada, but while Alessandra Facchinetti was learning that she'd been fired from Valentino from journalists, Hannah MacGibbon was preparing to step into the shoes of Paolo Melim Andersson, recently of this house, but now dispatched to the eternal holding room of designers who shouldn't have been hired in the first place. Not that Andersson wasn't talented, but he came from Marni, and Marni's boho was in his blood; Chloé's girlish prettiness wasn't. MacGibbon, by contrast, was part of the Chloé team in the golden reign of Phoebe Philo, so her debut collection was doubly mystifying.

The first enigma: copper-coloured metallic trousers. Weird trousers are in, but weird trousers that make even the models look 8ft wide? Next, those stegosaurus fins that embellished the first outfit, and a few other jackets and skirts. Admittedly, she made them look pretty, but Christopher McKane got there first, in London three weeks ago. In between the steg details and fat-pants were some sweet pieces - paper-bag skirts and shorts in lovely shades of lemon, apricot and taupe, cute ruffled apron tops - but there seemed to be a problem with the fit of some of the dresses. And a problem etched into the brows of the normally poker-faced buyers for whom this label used to be a cash cow. But note to Ralph Toledana, Chloé's CEO: give MacGibbon more than three seasons to prove herself.

Alexander McQueen

McQueen's shows are often a bit of a mental assault course. This time it was the life-sized stuffed animals that adorned the catwalk -not Paddington Bear, but polar bear, leopard and various others of their endangered pals - that provoked a twinge. “Every species is fragile,” read the programme notes, “but animals are the underdogs while we are actually bringing about our own extinction - and theirs.” Animals certainly are the underdogs, and the under pelts (and top pelts) in many a collection. Mentioning no names, of course, because this is a spring/summer collection and even most Italian designers don't do fur in July.

I should probably focus on the clothes rather than the philosophy of extinction, because they are extraordinary. We expect faultless engineering from McQueen, but even fluid silk dresses seemed to be constructed on a kind of invisible scaffolding. McQueen says he was inspired by the Industrial Revolution, and perhaps his work is the closest clothes will come to Brunel's suspension bridge in their blend of technique and imagination. An overlapping fringed dress with an embroidered sheer lace back seemed to change from black to charcoal as the model moved. While those head-to-floor animal prints won't be everyone's cup of tea, there are bound to be more commercial pieces in the showroom. Now if a figure such as McQueen would stop using skins in his winter collections, that would be a revolution, too.
Source: Times Online

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