The Business of Fashion
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
PARIS, France — The Eighties are having a huge comeback this season in Paris and elsewhere. It's a matter of big shoulders, banana-shaped trousers and curvaceous hyper-bodies redesigned by clothes, of course. But it is mostly a matter of a codified depiction of womanhood: strong, assertive, sensual and in control.
Back then, the Miyake wonder woman was on a league of her own: capturing the zeitgeist with an all defining air of tribal futurism. The vision was so forward-thinking, it could easily be translated into the present tense, even better outside of the 1980s trend. It would surely make the Miyake identity more strongly felt.
Instead, what do we have? Challenging and utterly innovative fabrics shaped into cocoons that variously wrap the body depicting a rather sweet, kawaii idea of woman — or girl, to be accurate. Along the way, the strength, the stubborness and the allure got completely lost.
Designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae is doing ok. But he keeps focusing on the fabrics, forgetting that it is the vision of a woman translated into shapes that carries a house like this forward. It is a pity that all the Miyake innovation keeps being narrowed around pleats: it's a diminishing effort. It's time to dish out something bold again. Pleats, if necessary, will follow.
Even workwear can be couture-ified in the hands of Marc Jacobs, whose off-calendar shows remain primetime draws for the New York fashion industry.
Casey Cadwallader and Pieter Mulier prove that iconic design signatures can be rewritten for a new age.
Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino and Kim Jones at Fendi have very different visions for Rome’s most famous fashion houses
Couture week delivered a dizzying mix of the surreal and clothes actually meant to be worn by clients, writes Angelo Flaccavento.