Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture F/W 11.12 Now in HD

Associated Press

PARIS — Jean Paul Gaultier was the fox in the proverbial hen-house, serving up a feather-filled and plumage-plastered fall-winter 2011-12 haute couture collection on Wednesday.

Every conceivable bird was there. Rooster, ostrich, swan, turkey and pheasant feathers peeked out from the hemlines of trench coats and fluttered out from beneath the necklines of bustiers and other Gaultier staples. And even when they weren’t visible from the outside, the feathers were there on the inside, stuffing the puffer jackets and A-line skirts made from down-filled duvets.

A cropped leather jacket was entirely embroidered with black rooster’s feathers that gleamed darkly, like an oil slick. A model appeared to be transforming, “Black Swan”-style, into a macaw, her bustier an explosion of feathers in saturated tropical shades.

In a nod to the blockbuster movie, Gaultier paired tutus with his signature pinstriped suits and sent out high heels that looked like satin pointe shoes with a metal platform to hike up the heel.

Gaultier has a prodigious imagination, and his creativity can sometimes get the upper hand and overshadow the clothes themselves, but Wednesday’s collection hit the sweet spot between fancy and rigor.

Chanel Haute Couture F/W 11.12 - Improved and Updated

Add caption

PARIS, July 5, 2011

By Tim Blanks

Karl Lagerfeld recently acquired a full set of stills from 1927's apocalyptic sci-fi classic Metropolis, signed by the film's director Fritz Lang to its young star Brigitte Helm. It was sheer coincidence, however, that there was aMetropolis feel to the set for today's Chanel haute couture show. Or was it? The backdrop for the presentation was a neon-limned mock-up of the Place Vendôme, with Napoleon replaced at the top of his column by a robot Coco. (In Lang's movie, a mad scientist makes a robot replica of Helm.) The set was dark and glistening, like rain had just fallen. A perfect film noir atmosphere, in other words. And Lagerfeld had the perfect script for it—Coco's own life story.

Zuhair Murad Haute Couture F/W 11.12

Basil Soda Haute Couture F/W 11.12

Givenchy Haute Couture F/W 11.12

Giorgio Armani Prive Haute Couture F/W 11.12 - now with video

PARIS, July 5, 2011

By Tim Blanks

Giorgio Armani is clearly looking East. After a Resort collection that drew on Imperial China, the Fall haute couture collection he showed today was an homage to Japan. While it's true that China represents an unprecedented business opportunity—meaning it's smart to market to it—Armani's connection to Japan is a deeper and more emotional one. He has been financially supporting a UNESCO scholarship program to help child victims of March's disaster. With today's Privé show, he wanted to show his support in a more personal way, and also perhaps acknowledge a creative debt that stretches back decades, or at least to his famous samurai-influenced collection.

The result was a striking symbiosis of man and country. Japanese visual icons—ranging from parasols to cherry blossoms—were predictably transmuted in prints, and, equally predictably, there were obilike belts and origamilike folds. But it felt like Armani had reflected on new Japan as much as old traditions, because there was a hint of Rei Kawakubo's original radicalism in the man-tailored pants, in the layered, elongated Edwardian line, in odd details like the double cuff on a jacket sleeve, and especially in all the asymmetry. Witness a one-armed jacket, the single floral-printed pannier that hung off a black bolero, or the diagonal slash that bisected a velvet dress to reveal a printed interior. And, seeing we're on the subject of the new, the collection's major futuristic flourish—the stiffened bodices that stood up like shields over the torso—could potentially also be laid at Japan's door. Was it protection they offered?

The drama of the clothes—and their inspiration—literally came to a head with the origami architecture of Philip Treacy's "hats." They highlighted the structured nature of Armani's couture, which was as deliberate here as a black patent-leather bodice and a world apart from the fluidity of his ready-to-wear. Remarkable, really, that a man at this stage in his career should be pushing forward into country that is uncharted for him. But the path was illuminated by pieces like the glowing evening sheath, crusted with thousands of tangerine bugle beads, that helped close the show.

Giambattista Valli, Haute Couture F/W 11.12 Paris

PARIS, July 4, 2011

By Tim Blanks - style.com

On the day when he was finally able to realize his long-nursed couture dreams,Giambattista Valli rose to the challenge of tradition with a collection that threw down the gauntlet to anyone who would insist that this rarified métier is on its last legs. Valli celebrated the past when he used the white poplin shirtdress—the blouse de cabine—of the atelier worker as a building block. The most obvious example: the way he layered a black lamé tweed skirt over the "blouse." But if that combination of casual and couture felt like essential Valli, there were many more examples of the designer's ability to meld formality and—for want of a better word—fun. Try a cocktail dress that proceeded downward from a pink coral yoke to a crystal-ed black body to a hem of ostrich feathers. Or the coat-dress in oh-so-serious gazar that dissolved from a coral bodice to a skirt in lacquered lemon blossom.

Amid such sensual pleasures, Valli anchored the floaty and the flyaway, conveying the essential rigor of couture design with his animal-printed mousselines and monochrome florals. He even paraded a penitent, a woman in an ostrich-feather sheath swathed in a black lace veil. But, more to the Vatican-friendly point, Valli also proposed a shot of red, like Valentino before him. Perhaps it's no wonder couture-inclined designers from Rome love red. You could almost say it's by papal decree.

Christian Dior, Haute Couture F/W 11.12 - now with video

PARIS, July 4, 2011

By Tim Blanks

You can't be down on a boy with a dream. For decades, Bill Gaytten strives under John Galliano's yoke as one of his most intimate facilitators, then suddenly fate conspires to throw him into the lead role, and he has the means to do everything he has ever wanted to do, everything he has ever bitten his tongue over. What's more, he has a team of the industry's best who have cherished him these long years for the adorable creature he is, and they are prepared to help him realize his dream: Stephen Jones with his headpieces, Jeremy Healy on beats, Michael Howells with his set design, Pat McGrath on makeup, Orlando Pita on hair. And they do this not just because they love Bill but because they want to acknowledge the achievements of his fallen master.

So what happens next?

On the evidence of today's first Dior couture show without John Galliano, what happens is a misjudged effort to impress an alien thumbprint on an aesthetic that, for better or worse, is one of the fashion industry's most clearly defined. After the show, a remarkably sanguine, even elated Gaytten was perfectly happy to celebrate the opportunity he'd been given to bring his own tastes to the fore, and they were significantly architectural: Frank Gehry, Jean-Michel Frank, the Memphis movement of the eighties. The opening outfit—a crazy-paving jacket with a ruffled collar and a full pleated skirt—kind of caught the postmodern madness of Memphis. And the subsequent parade of folded, tiered, unfinished taffeta, gazar, and organza had a similar assault-on-couture-orthodoxy vibe. There was a Bar jacket or two in the mix, acknowledging Dior's legacy, but the overriding sense was that a demon, long-contained, had been released, so that the Dior woman had suddenly been possessed by a disco dolly who, to the strains of Grace Jones, would blow out her hair and rampage to the nearest dance floor in a molto-bat-winged hostess gown that perfectly captured the campiness of cult-fave TV play Abigail's Party.

Alexis Mabille Haute Couture F/W 11.12

 PARIS, July 4, 2011
By Tim Blanks - style.com

A young designer like Alexis Mabille is living testament to the potency of the Parisian couture mythos. The gowns he creates are the sort of thing you imagine a boy racked by fever dreams of fashion would conjure up: big, elaborate, luxe confections that would once have been the very definition of "Paris fashion" for the likes of magazine readers, moviegoers, and anyone anywhere who lived a vicarious life as opposed to a glamorous one. But Mabille always brings more than that to the table, usually something arcane and utterly French. It doesn't always work, but at least he gets an A for effort.

This time, he looked to La Fontaine's classic animal fables, dressing his models in outfits inspired by all forms of furred, feathered, and feelered creatures. The Ant was in glossy black crepe, with side slits baring an expanse of thigh. The wings of her Grasshopper rival were duplicated in lamé and duchesse satin on the bodice of a dress.

The Black Wolf was in black velvet with Swarovski "fangs" running down both arms. Long silk fringes were bunched to form a bustier for The Horse. Then they were tied in the back, where they flowed into a tail-like train. The Magpie was perhaps the simplest and the most effective: an elongated black swallowtail coat over a white crepe column.

There was both drama and logic in such pieces. But not always. The poor Swan was cursed with mustard yellow leggings below her minidress of tattered white organza. As for the Frog (which sounds so much better in the original as La Grenouille), she wore a silk gown so huge it was easy to imagine dwarves were supporting her under her dress. At least that was an image that stuck with the fabulist theme, but it also highlighted Mabille's tendency to the overwrought. A weakness, for now.

Elie Saab Haute Couture F/W 11.12

PARIS, July 6, 2011

By Nicole Phelps - style.com

Elie Saab has said à bientôt to Miss Havisham. Where his January Couture show drooped under the weight of heavy embellishments, this collection felt a bit lighter and—it follows—more modern. That's not to say that the designer has changed his look; there were still scads of beads and crystals, as befits the haute couture, and even strips of fur were used as accents. But Saab's diaphanous, fairy princess dresses felt of this Paris moment. He caught the feeling for the long-sleeved, slim gowns that we've seen elsewhere, opening with one in an icy gray-blue tulle that was draped and gathered at the waist and accented with metallic silver.

Next up was a sleeveless full-length dress followed by a knee-skimming number in the same shade of aquamarine. Saab worked his methodical way through his palette. After a section in pale blue came white, then pink, mauve, and brown. He ended with a navy group and a single bride in platinum white. It seemed there was a backless dress in every color. Saab's old-fashioned, repetitive way of showing detracts from his precious workmanship. He's seen fit to upgrade the clothes themselves; now, perhaps it's time to update his presentations. He could start by kissing the wind machine good-bye.

Valentino Haute Couture F/W 11.12

PARIS, July 6, 2011

By Tim Blanks - style.com

A mood board methodically arranged with haunting pictures of the last tsar's family and their lost world cued the fairy-tale princess feel of Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli's new couture collection forValentino. One dress—dévoré-ed flowers on a sheer background, with pleated tulle wings flying from the shoulders—was so Neverland-ready that it was a wonder it didn't elevate then and there from the catwalk.

A similar magic infused much of the rest of the collection, even daywear like the tweed suit that was gilded with gold and platinum. There was a fearlessness in the fact that so much of it was so old-fashioned, in specifics like the buttons running up the sleeve of a governess-y pale crepe gown or down the back of a black cashmere coat, or, more generally, in the neo-medieval restraint and decorum of long-sleeved, floor-length gowns. One, in black velvet, was practically penitent. But Chiuri and Piccioli's signal achievement has been to turn the old-fashioned into something new and irresistible. "A sense of memory," was Piccioli's cryptic clue. "Not nostalgic," Chiuri added quickly. True, how could they—or any of their glamorous young clientele—possibly be nostalgic about a period they had no direct experience of? But what the designers seemed to be talking about was the way they have managed to take the foundations of haute couture—the incredible, time-consuming, numbingly detailed techniques—and applied them to their own curious vision. Take that penitent black velvet gown, for instance. A few outfits later, it opened up into a delicate Gothic lattice that was suggestively contemporary.