The Joy of Escapism

New York Times

28-01-2025

It was Day 1 of the couture shows in a chilly Paris, and the Schiap pack were tottering around the Petit Palais in their gold-toe shoes and anatomical gold jewelry, swinging their bejeweled Face bags and waiting for the Schiaparelli show to start.
That they were a little — um, overdressed for 10 a.m. on a Monday didn't seem to startle anyone. They had loosed the bonds of convention and entered that liminal space known as fashionland, where ball gowns at dawn are a perfectly reasonable response to the trauma of waking up.
'All I really want is to suspend the weight of reality,' Daniel Roseberry, Schiaparelli's artistic director, said backstage before his show. 'I hope people are transported, even if just for 10 minutes. That's my goal.'
Then his first look appeared, a high-neck, long-sleeve lace top covered in enamel flowers and dropping into tiers of organza ruffles with the aged look of cloth dipped in tea, like a relic from the courtly era. And it was clear: We were entering a Trump-free zone.
Designers love to talk about 'beauty' and 'elegance' as their Band-Aid for the ills of the world; a panacea for the eyes, made to offset a reality that can be harder to see. Often this comes across as defensive; an excuse for not taking a stand on an issue or not getting involved. Sometimes, it can make the industry seem so out of touch, so determinedly frivolous, it's paradoxically unattractive.
But sometimes it is exactly what you need.
This is one of those times. Reality is so unrelentingly exhausting, so overwhelming and uncertain, that having a moment to escape into fantasy, to ogle at the sheer skill of seamstresses who can perform the kind of material alchemy that would leave Rumpelstiltskin in awe, is a balm.
And for this the couture, the handmade for the .001 percent slice of fashion that is not about wearability but rather doing the impossible, is almost perfectly conceived. It brings you sliding down wormholes of reference and craft into moments of how-did-they-do-that delight that have nothing to do with whether you can actually buy the clothes, and everything to do with simply reveling in the view. With thinking: 'Yeah, take me away!'
Perhaps that's why, as the shows got underway, time traveling seemed to be something of a theme, with corsets and hoop skirts and the exaggerated S curve of the belle epoque — all padded hips and bottom and bust — dominating the runways. Even the body was being transformed.
Perhaps that's why, for a show that wasn't officially couture, but that was entirely couture-inspired, Simon Porte Jacquemus lured his guests to a penthouse aerie in the 16th Arrondissement that once had been owned by the early 20th-century French architect Auguste Perret, and which now is being restored. Then he ferried them upstairs in an elevator staffed by bellhops and took them on a whistle-stop tour of classic haute tropes such as the Trapeze, the New Look and the Caban, built on 1950s corsetry and filmed on a variety of iPhone 16s set up around the space. It had an illusory feel, if not too much originality.
And perhaps that's why, at Christian Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri took a trip down the rabbit hole to a wonderland of her own imagination (and, she said in a preview, childhood memories) made of hoop skirts and frilly pantaloons, Edwardian tailcoats and little black dresses.
Since she arrived at Dior in 2016, Ms. Chiuri has often resolutely focused on clothes so subtly accessible they can verge on the banal. But though there were pieces like that in the show, including a great little sleeveless black trapeze shift with ruffles for straps, it was the skirts, built on a carapace of bamboo, covered in trailing vines of flowers made from raffia, feathers and lace, and resembling the love child of an octopus and a parasol, that dominated. Also the playsuits and bloomers (items of clothing that normally have no place in a grown-up woman's wardrobe) made from tulle covered in appliqués that seemed to swirl around the body like mist, popping out from under buttoned-up Jane Eyre jackets as though impossible to restrain.
Imagine Queen Titania's minions had escaped from her Midsummer Night's Dream and ended up in a bordello in New Orleans' French Quarter, and you'll get the idea.
That none of it made any sense juxtaposed against the surreal embroideries designed by the Indian artist Rithika Merchant, which decorated the walls of the Dior tent in the gardens of the Musée Rodin and had their origins in an entirely different mythical tradition, simply added to the unreality of the experience.
Just as, at Schiaparelli, the extreme construction of the clothes — sculpted jackets that circled the shoulders like bejeweled orbital rings before cinching in waists so tiny they suggested ribs might have been removed; trompe l'oeil hip bones built out to dangerous points beneath bullet breasts — underscored the sense that the garments themselves were practically decorative objects. The ability to sit down (or maybe even breathe) had been subjugated to the sheer Dadaist pleasure of wondering whether what you were seeing was a goddess or a vase.
Either way, it seemed like a dream.