The Paris fashion show that remade the looks of "American Psycho"

LGN Louis-Gabriel Nouchi is a brand little known outside fashion circles and little visited by the more mainstream public. Yet this should not be the case: in a world of fashion shows inspired by historical periods, art catalogs or even more or less abstruse philosophical concepts, Nouchi draws inspiration from the world of literature and each collection represents a "translation," so to speak, of the page written on the catwalk. For his past two collections Nouchi had drawn inspiration from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's The Dangerous Liaisons and Baudelaire's The Artificial Paradises, while the show with which the FW23 collection of the brand that bears his name was presented yesterday was entirely inspired by American Psycho. The theme explored by Nouchi specifically is that of toxic masculinity, of which the sociopath Patrick Bateman is perhaps one of the most famous symbols - if this toxic masculinity was expressed in the book and the film through the obsession with designer suits, the superficial display of luxury and wealth that became manic and exalted conformity (remember, both in the book and the film, how Bateman adored the song It's hip to be square so much that he used it as the soundtrack for Paul Allen's murder), the rethinking work done by Nouchi was directed precisely at the subtle subversion of these sartorial codes symbolic of ethical codes.

The references to American Psycho, as mentioned, were many starting with the collection's opening look: a semi-faithful reproduction of one of the most famous images from the film starring Christian Bale that includes a very long double-breasted coat, shirt and tie peeking out from his cleavage, hair slicked back, and a face smeared with blood. In addition to the blood, which also recurred in other total-red looks surely inspired by the book's final chapters, other models had their faces smeared with what appeared to be face cream - referencing the famous incipits of the film and the book in which Patrick Bateman describes in painstaking and disturbing detail the many steps of his morning skin routine.

Another look included leather gloves and bags of various colors that contained weapons literally sealed in leather and rendered useless by their own sheathing, a double reference to the aforementioned murder of Paul Allen, who was killed precisely with an axe and whose corpse, in both the book and the film, is hidden inside a Jean Paul Gaultier duffel bag. The draperies in the cellophane represented the plastic sheeting in which Bateman wrapped his victims, while two other references were instead to the level of the actual clothes: toward the end some looks made of transparent leather could be read as the translucent raincoat Bateman wears for his murders, while the murders themselves are recalled in the shirts and jackets whose slanted seams create the effect of knife slashes. 

The most arcane of quotations, however, was that of the 20 look, in which, in addition to the aforementioned black bag, there is a blue trench coat and an elegant shirt whose collar, however, is tied by a latex tie, a tiny detail that nevertheless encapsulates well the themes touched upon by American Psycho and its symbolism of a perverse and hidden nature emerging from a single misplaced detail. Elsewhere, the symbolism ran deeper, on a level less related to the narrative details of the book and more to the overall themes. American Psycho being a very dark satire on 1980s yuppie culture, for example, the emphasis of sartorial work fell on shoulders and office attire whose proportions were exaggerated. Around them, looks were structured around classic wardrobe pieces of that era such as silhouettes inspired by vintage sportswear while in other looks more untethered from the immediate inspiration deconstructed the iconography of toxic masculinity through the subversion of its own symbols. Perhaps Patrick Bateman would have opted to dress differently than this - but we are sure he would have appreciated being so much the center of general attention.