Give me five: the best fashion shows of Paris Haute Couture FW17

Adieu Paris High Fashion!

The fashion collection dedicated to the most precious collections ends with a trace of unique fabrics and silhouettes, sequins and floral embroidery, chiffon and fur, minidress sculptures and trenches made with old cardboard boxes.

One after another, the designers have transformed different places of the French capital in the enchanted gardens, lands to explore inhabited by giraffes and elephants, impressionist paintings, 40s noir movie set.

Choosing the most beautiful suggestions is difficult, NSS tried.

Viktor & Rolf

The reality is so strange at the moment, so why not show it the surreal side perhaps with giant dolls?
This is the bizarre question that Rolf Snoeren and Viktor Horsting, better known as Viktor & Rolf, made themselves designing their high fashion collection.

No sooner said than done. On the catwalk, beside real models, action dolls with huge head made of cloth, a disturbing element that reminds us that revolution is part of reality.

And what is the perfect garment to fight for a better world?

According to the designers’ duo is the puffer to wear with t-shirt, patchwork jeans and Dr Martens. Viktor & Rolf decline this garment outwear couture in dozens of variations, all of impeccable tailoring, but with different details: maxi bows, ruffles, puffed sleeves, hoods, overlaps, asymmetries.

The result? Surreal, original, interesting, impeccable.

Iris Van Herpen

Paris. Cirque d'Hiver.
A dark room, lit only by 5 tanks, inside, submerged in water, the musicians of the Danish group Between Music. On the catwalk Aeriform Haute Couture collection of Iris Van Herpen.

The Dutch designer seeks light in the dark, exploring with her romantic vision the new frontiers of fashion.

"Air and water are the structural and visual components of the eighteen elaborate silhouettes of the collection and have influenced the development of both the textiles and garment construction, which is reflected in their volumes, rippling patterning and translucent layering", Van Herpen explained.

Art, science, engineering and digital technology shape aerial materiality and lightness, become laser-cut dresses and molded like a silver web or silver clouds surrounded by a feathery-light metal lace drawing geodesic floral motifs.

More than just a fashion show, an art installation, an emotional journey.

Christian Dior

In the courtyard facing the Dome des Invalides, the Baroque chapel where Napoleon’s tomb is preserved, there is a beautiful garden with cypresses, fir trees, olive trees, bamboo canes and large wooden skeletons of rhinos, elephants and giraffes.
Here an audience among whom are recognized Jennifer Lawrence, Karlie Kloss, Olivia Palermo, Celine Dion, Elizabeth Olsen and Robert Pattinson expects to see the latest Dior Haute Couture collection created by Maria Grazia Chiuri.

To achieve this, the Italian designer recalls figures of courageous and restless women, pioneers such as the English essayist and cartographer Freya Stark, the Austrian explorer Ida Pfeiffer, the caretaker Amelia Earheart or Harriet Adams, a journalist who came to join the society of geographers.

She takes these heroines and contaminates them with a re-reading of Monsieur Christian Dior’s work, of the silhouette that made him famous, of the T-Bar suit, but not only. So the aviator leather and fur jumpsuit with homburg hat and hooded-coat, with silk gazar evening dresses with other velvet or tulle, stunning men’s coats tight waist by thin crocodile belts with wide-leg trousers, wool jacket with flannel skirts constructed with a folded sleeve twice so as to become three-dimensional.

Each of these sixty-six modern explorers dressed up by Maria Grazia Chiuri is a small masterpiece of tailoring, portability and style.

Maison Margiela

Looking at the new collection designed by John Galliano for the Maison Margiela Artisanal line is clear that the marriage between these two entities of fashion was born under a lucky star.

In the reign of the enigmatic Martin, the Gibraltar designer continues his investigation of the structure of the clothes: deconstructs, drains, cuts, pastes, recomposes, rebounds. Looking at the new collection designed by John Galliano for the Maison Margiela Artisanal line is clear that the marriage between these two entities fashion was born under a lucky star: John Galliano deconstructs, drains, cuts, pastes, recomposes, rebounds.

Like a stylish Picasso he paints hybrid figures. The mannish jacket becomes a corset; packaging cartons are turned into trench coats and bustiers; the Mackintosh coats are filled with geometric cuts; macros paillette are veiled by layers of superimposed tulle.

There is a sort of work in progress mood that envelops these creations, amplified by the location of the show, a space inside the headquarters of the house at 163 rue Saint Maur, between office-laboratory of Galliano and the adjacent fitting room.

Fendi

After creating the Eiffel Tower for Chanel, at Fendi Karl Lagerfeld cultivates an enchanted garden that seems to have come out from a Monet’s picture.

The clothes worn by Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner and other models bloom one after another: the trench coat in Astrakhan, whites and blacks tailleur, the carved lace dresses, capes with floral embroidery, minidress with lace bodice and skirt of fur, suit with leather lace effect for which it took 2,600 hours of work.

Each of 42 items from Flowers From Another World is an example of tailoring and opulence. Each one is decorated with petal cascades, feather inserts that form irises, watercolor paintbrushes of impressive canvases, woven tunic, poppies inspired inlays, leather laces.

Minks, sables and precious lambs in the hands of Lagerfeld become the canvas of a flower garden, as beautiful and vivid as to be almost more beautiful work of Mother Nature.

BONUS

Rodarte

Kirsten Dunst, Miranda July, Brie Larson and Tracee Ellis Ross attend the Rodarte Parisian debut.

The Mulleavy sisters remain faithful to their style and recreate a romanticism tempered by folk influences and motorcycle mood. Fill the austere cloister of the Port-Royal abbey with plants and flowers by the famous florist Debaulieu. Flowers that adorn the dresses and models, twisted around their arms, shoulders, hips, and around the head. The girls look modern Venus of Botticelli, Californian hippie groupies on vacation in Ville Lumiere.

They wear flamenco dresses, transparent chiffon creases with metallic ribbons, romantic bald caps, dresses printed with a paradise bird, biker suits. They are free, young, fresh, romantic, but not mushy.