LVMH owned ready-to-wear brand Patou unofficially opened Paris Haute Couture Week on Sunday evening getting the party started with disco ready vibes, Iris Van Herpen fused technology with tradition and Charles de Vilmorin started his eponymous label afresh following his break from Rochas.
Patou
“The skirts are not made short for the sake of being short, they’re made for dancing,” said Patou creative director Guillaume Henri backstage after his show on the eve of Paris Haute Couture Week. While his Salle Wagram venue hosted grand balls in the 19th century, he drew on the more contemporary Paris party scene of the ’90s and ’00s — the city’s famous Sunday all-dayers which started in the afternoon and finished at midnight.
Entitled Dancing Diaries, the collection with its dance floor ready vibes from flippy skirts to strass by the kilo was about joy and fun. Dancing shoes were done in collaboration with emerging French shoe label Bettina Vermillion will heels chunky enough to see the wearer through to dawn.
As Henri said, Patou is not a brand focused on dressing celebrities for the stage, it’s retail driven — evinced by the introduction of new bag silhouettes and entry level accessories.
Sustainability is a high priority with 70 percent of its output made from recycled or organic fabrics — strass included. In an evolution of its partnership with the Order Group on digital fingerprint authentication technology for a bag capsule earlier this year, Henri said that all the clothes now bear a QR code that accesses information about their provenance. Like Chloe’s digital ID initiative, this remains off chain for now.
“I’m not a politician a soldier,” said Henri in conclusion, “we’re not going to save the world but we just want to make things better.”
Iris Van Herpen
For her fall ‘23 Haute Couture collection, Iris Van Herpen drew inspiration from a new architectural movement called aquatic urbanism which means extending a city onto the water. “I come from The Netherlands which is below sea level so it’s something I think about a lot,” she told Forbes backstage. She also cited a new floating city called Oceanix being built in South Korea which is integrating closed loop water systems and net-zero energy into its design.
Always keen to explore the intersection of technology and high fashion, her collection blended laser cutting, 3D printing and injection moulding with more classical techniques such as plissé and hand embroidery.
“We are able to merge the techniques more and more — sometimes there are multiple techniques in one look. It brings haute couture into the future,” she said.
Charles de Vilmorin
Like Ludovic de Saint Sernin who showed his own label during Paris Men’s Fashion Week — his first outing since his departure from Ann Demeulemeester — Haute Couture Week marked a new chapter for Charles de Vilmorin who recently parted company with Rochas.
“I was thinking about creation,” he said of his collection. “Like the blank piece of paper you have in front of you before you start to create.”
Draped all white looks segued into technicolor with a quorum of his signature prints before taking on a darker vibe —“dark and precise,” as the designer put it.
But it was the surrealist sculptural headpieces — twinning swans and a rearing wild horse — that stole the show.
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