PARIS — They make an odd couple, Thom Browne and Rick Owens, with clearly little to connection them past nationality. However as Americ...
PARIS — They make an odd couple, Thom Browne and Rick Owens, with clearly little to connection them past nationality. However as Americans appearing in Paris, the two originators are joined in joining a long line of their kinsmen who have displayed pivotal work in a city that opens its arms to choose foreigners, if not precisely to all.
"Thom began appearing here in light of the fact that he knew there was space in Paris for what he was doing," Miki Higasa, a New York-based brand strategist who has been with Mr. Browne from the begin, said before his men's wear demonstrate last Sunday, held in an occasion fixate on the city's devastate edge.
A long way from the memorable heart of Paris, this area of the nineteenth Arrondissement frequently has the look of a city disentangling. Syrian displaced people beg by the roadsides close to the Avenue de la Porte de la Villette, while settlements of destitute African men warm themselves over flames on a parkway middle. The decision of area for the Browne indicate honed a watcher's feeling of untenable differentiations: on one hand, an excellent exhibition of daring aptitudes by an originator fixated on control and arrange, and on the other, an inclination that, simply outside the Paris Event Center, the middle scarcely holds.
Against a set made out of 30 thick felt design pieces orchestrated in heaps, as off-cuts from a Robert Morris form, and lit by 30 suspended fluorescent workroom lights, Mr. Browne's presentation was an augmented exposition on the deconstruction of his mark suit of dark herringbone fleece.
To start with, models in face-hiding head protectors, wearing fleece bodysuits studded with woolen "catches," shirts with sleeves streaming to the floor and boots that rendered their feet unpliable as hooves, crawled around the edge, scarcely ready to see or move. They were trailed by men wearing a progression of sculptural pieces that impacted separated the suit and sorted it pull out in two measurements, similar to constructivist Colorforms. The outcome was a conceptual, westernized variant of fight dress worn by samurai.
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On the off chance that you looked sufficiently hard, it was conceivable to identify business components in what was for the most part an execution craftsmanship piece (one maybe needing a dramaturge). However progressively it is obvious that Mr. Browne's accumulations are pitched toward his children — the unavoidable exhibition hall review — and similarly that his sculptural garments is defensive layer to shield the wearer from a threatening world.
Mr. Owens, as well, methodologies design with a stone carver's eye to assemble accumulations frequently misrepresented as mirroring a tragic vision. Nothing could be further from reality. Like Mr. Browne, Mr. Owens is a fashioner focused on wellness and anatomical control. However in his work, by difference, the muddled mind disguised behind an idealized weight lifter outside has a method for ejecting — rich, raucous, unyieldingly alive.
As dependably in a Rick Owens appear, there was bounty to please retailers — here, a pack of deliberately destroyed coats and layers of interwoven calfskin and material on a level plane striped and worn over pants of slipcover extents and shoes with yokel soles and a distending rack at the heel. In any case, that stuff was only an affection for Mr. Owens to play with volumes, basically in a progression of hung and tied down-filled pieces of clothing expelled and protruding, torqued and surging, doing combating or surrendering to gravity in ways that evoked Nancy Rubins figures, by method for Charles James.
Improbable pairings were strung through the shows here, pinging off each other delightfully. There was Olivier Rousteing's psycho accumulation for Balmain of clothes so frantically bejeweled and studded that they looked like something thought up by an amphetamine-confounded star wrestler on an Etsy orgy. Furthermore, there was the inclusive and agreeable coed accumulation displayed via Carol Lim and Humberto Leon for Kenzo, enlivened, the originators noted, by cold surfers, a subculture few knew existed before Sunday night.
There were the finely adjusted accumulations displayed by Haider Ackermann, making his presentation at Berluti, and by Véronique Nichanian, a prepared architect at Hermès. Each was misleadingly simple, and each highlighted closet components for individuals from another subculture practically as extraordinary as that of the wet-suited crackpots riding the bone chilling severs Iceland's Troll Peninsula: the ultrarich.
Who, one marvels, are the folks for whom Ms. Nichanian makes? The appropriate response keeps on confusing this commentator, but what stays clear is that fortunate is the man who can bear the cost of her great looking shearling blouson coats, high-midriff pants cut both wide and thin, slouchy belted trenches and pullovers of sheepskin sheared to look like link sew.
Also honored by karma is the Berluti client who can enjoy one of the twofold breasted suits with high-bound pants that Mr. Ackerman sent onto a plywood runway in his first excursion since assuming control from Alessandro Sartori as innovative chief of a mark that is the pet venture of Antoine Arnault, child of Bernard Arnault, purportedly the wealthiest man in France.
Quickly, a hallucination grabbed hold of me amid the Hermès appear on Sunday as the Austrian model Serge Rigvava walked onto the runway clad in a faultlessly cut six-catch twofold breasted suit of verdigris velvet. For a traverse of a few seconds, I reveled the dream of taking up citizenship in this universe of exorbitant extravagance shopper merchandise. At that point I recollected my Verizon bill was past due, and the fantasy unexpectedly finished: visa renounced.
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