Valentino /Spring 2012 RTW

As four weeks of shows draw to a close, it’s apparent that the value of the sincere and personally felt vision is almost the paramount thing in fashion. To make a lasting impression, any house or individual designer needs the ability to open a window on a world of their own—and then make us believe we can be part of it. Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli have reached that state of grace at Valentino—a house which has always “owned” such nebulous qualities as prettiness, fragility, and romance. At one point, it seemed as if those notions could have slipped into history with the retirement of Valentino himself. But now his successors are achieving an effortless balance between maintaining the fantasy, and making it beautifully accessible to a modern girl. Their spring show was a long essay on Valentino’s supremacy in the art of finessing everything that can be done with lace – but brought wholly into a contemporary context.

Chiuri and Piccioli said they’d been looking at Mexican folk embroidery and the photographs of Graciela Iturbide and Edward Weston—not that you really need to know this. The knack they have is for using intricate and delicate fabric and making it simple to wear. Their first looks, which they said were derived from “dowry lace,” were made in a cotton canvas—reminiscent of the linens you still see used in Italian homes. From there, they worked on lace appliquéd onto organza in flounces, fine Chantilly net, lace worked into micro-flowers, denser, and crunchier guipure right through to silvery, slightly Deco metallic lace for the finale.

It could easily have been a case of overkill—or just an exhausting exhibition of couture-grade fabric wares. But for all the labor that goes into the materials, the clever part is the way the designers reined it back from being cloyingly ingénue or sugary.

Part of that is due to their modest but flattering shapes, usually neatly fitted into a slightly raised waist, with high necklines and some kind of quiet emphasis on the sleeves, which bloom into gentle puffs or soft balloons caught into the cuff. And part of it is their modern and realistic understanding of how a girl wants to feel and move when she goes out. Most of their girls walked in flat thong sandals with tiny, glittery block heels, looking as if they’d just shrugged on their dresses and run out, feeling easy and comfortable with themselves.by Sarah Mower

Chanel / Spring 2012 RTW

Beneath the soaring glass domes of the Grand Palais, the Chanel set transported us to the undersea world of Karl Lagerfeld; an aquatic wonderland of gleaming white stingrays and sea horses adrift amongst coral branches and shells on a sandy sea bed. Lagerfeld had promised “the ground of the sea, but in a very poetic way,” and his models, meandering through this dramatic set to a techno soundtrack abstracted from Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” looked like magical deep-sea sirens, from the pearls scattered in their hair to the sea- urchin shells that propped up the heels of their sandals.

Lagerfeld deconstructed some of the house symbols. Coco’s iconic pearls were used as buttons or as belts to girdle his round-shouldered dresses, and Lagerfeld banished her signature braid trims altogether in place of fine black ribbon set in geometric blocks across pale suiting, a detail inspired by the “fabric paintings” of German abstract artist Blinky Palermo that he had admired in a recent exhibition at Dia.

Lagerfeld worked with innovative techno fabrics to create the effect of light through water. Airy waffle-textured organzas and iridescent synthetics, open-weave tweeds and knits, and a palette of sea foam, shell pink, and mother-of-pearl (anchored with the inevitable black) created an otherworldly effect.

And the details brought a whisper of the haute couture to the ready-to-wear season; changeante organza ribbons were appliquéd to trail across little shift dresses like seaweed swaying in a riptide; silvery embroideries or a frosting of nacreous sequins spilled down black dresses like the phosphorescence on a moonlit sea.


Swimsuits were anchored by pearl clasps or veiled in clear plastic “virtual jackets” printed with a tracery of fine black swirling lines like seaweed washed up on a seashore.

The technical mastery of this house was also revealed in the elaborate pleating and draping techniques that transformed diaphanous organza and (specially commissioned) seaweed motif lace into shapes and formations that recalled corals, seashells, and waving underwater algae, and provided the most complex takes on the pleated skirts that have become such a strong trend of the season.

As the final short evening dresses appeared (frothed with ruffles at the hips like lightweight eighteenth-century panniers—or reduced to a single flounce), a giant oyster shell opened to reveal Florence Welch (in a silvery dress trailing strands of seaweed ribbon), whose plangent tones brought the show to a spectacular end.by Hamish Bowles