The big names come out to play in Paris

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, PARIS
Tuesday, Oct 12, 2004, Page 16

"It's only a game," teased the invitation to Alexander McQueen's show, a joker card. Sure, fashion is just a game, but when the players are Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel, Phoebe Philo of Chloe, Jean Paul Gaultier of Hermes, and even that bluffer John Galliano, the rest might as well be playing Old Maid.

In a spree of excellence over the weekend, the French collections displayed world-class finesse, making the New York shows seem not only a distant memory but also, as one American store executive said, speaking on condition of anonymity, "like a bridge collection."

At the same time, the shows here have pointed up a curious new tension between the luxury rivals LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, which is struggling to find talent, and Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, which owns Gucci Group. For all the doubts that the suits at P.P.R. wouldn't be able to appreciate strong-willed designers like McQueen and Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga -- or even milder ones like Stella McCartney -- it is the Gucci Group brands that have generally shown more imagination. You don't sense that class has been tempered by the demands of commerce.

Colette Dinnigan

Although McQueen closed his superb show on Friday night with Suspicious Minds, its refrain "we can't go on like this" seemingly directed at P.P.R. executives in the front row, the choice was more likely his way of winding people up.

One can't forget that McQueen and Galliano are British; if the French can lie with a straight face, the British can pull your pants down. Nothing is sacred. People leaving the Galliano show on Saturday night looked slightly stricken, as if, after seeing his grass-hut hats, pink flamingo sweaters and dotty evening dresses (chased by a small inflated zoo of animals), they had swallowed a wasp.

Kenzo

That tricky Galliano

But think of the action at Galliano in terms of a Guy Ritchie movie. The characters in his chaotic films are always trying to trip someone up. There were lots of great looks in the Galliano show, looks that cool girls will get in about half a second -- skirts in psychedelic Sgt. Pepper prints, a white shag jacket with a dull tartan belt, oversize T-shirt dresses draped with hosiery-colored chiffon. But Galliano can't abide playing things straight. As fashion turns pretty (ghastly word), he has to trip it up.

Guy Laroche

For McQueen, something else must happen. He has too much pride to make clothes that don't meet his conceptual dreams. It's not for nothing that he presented his show, its initial inspiration the film Picnic at Hanging Rock, on an illuminated chessboard, the models standing in a Vanessa Beecroft-type formation. Themes ranged from Edwardian children's jackets with delicate ribbon trim and ticking-striped shirts to deceptively light teacup skirts, though the stellar piece was a layered chiffon gown with hobby horses spiraling in applique around the hem.

Marc Jacobs

But it takes another kind of discipline to become a full success, and that's what McQueen must strive for, too. "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," to use the title of Delmore Schwartz's seminal short story: McQueen is too good, too vital to fashion, to become, like Schwartz (or, in fashion, Paul Poiret), a lurid example of failed genius.

Alber Elbaz

"Shh, don't mention Poiret," Lagerfeld said during fittings at Chanel. "It's bad luck. Poiret went out of business." Lagerfeld was referring to the starry nighttime ceiling he had created for the post-show party at his home to salute Nicole Kidman and Baz Luhrmann and their new Chanel No. 5 commercial. Poiret famously held a ball with an inflatable rubber sky.

Lagerfeld is in no danger of ending in a garret, however. He isn't joking when he says of himself, "lots of class but working class." If younger designers are to expect freedom from their bosses, as he has from his, they have to have something of his discipline.

His "Red Carpet" Chanel show worked ingeniously on several levels. There was the art-imitating-life moment when he plucked Kidman from her front-row seat and escorted her through a crush of photographers, as if toward a film premiere. And then there was the reverse, when life behaved as you want it to: with skimmy black evening dresses sashed in ribbon, pastel tweed coats with tiny kid gloves, playful sportswear in paper-thin gold denim, cobweb knits, and a slick black bathing suit robed in black lace that was a great blend of porno and Deauville.

How does he do it? Carpe diem. After Kidman had retired for the night, and as the young people were dancing in his ballroom, Lagerfeld took portraits of guests in an adjacent room filled with German posters and furniture from the 1910s. He was still shooting at 2am.

Smaller lights shine bright

Gaultier and Philo also put on terrific shows, touched with a Parisian lightness that looks increasingly right. At Hermes, Gaultier moved away from the horsy theme of his first collection, concentrating on scarf prints and on sweet organza blouses in toile prints worn with jeans and armfuls of bangles. And he wisely reined in the excess, leaving a luxe imprint with lace-up platforms in crocodile.

Philo knows how to make a dirty dress look clean. Which is to say, here was a loose-fitting cocktail dress in white silk with silver sparkles at the neckline and a hem of hosiery-colored chiffon. She played with volume, pairing small jackets in ticking stripes with full skirts in cotton. The look was relaxed, and the illusion hemlines, also achieved with stripes and shiny fabrics, were a neat way to make clothes appear longer.

Eager to move away from his free-form layers, Rick Owens got too tricky with his cutting, creating jackets with weird ice-cream cone points and tubular skirts that were more horizontal than straight up. Christian Lacroix tried to give airy coats and lace minidresses a sun-bleached lightness, but the results often looked budget-restricted.

Marc Jacobs's collection for Louis Vuitton also seemed misjudged -- heavy on sequined embellishment, heavy on volumes that looked neither new nor user-friendly. Pharrell Williams collaborated on the cool shades, but having Christina Ricci walk down the runway at the start of the show and take her seat in the audience seemed a case of imitating Chanel. Anyway, as some of the photographers concluded afterward, they were put alongside the runway not to create extra heat but to be at eye-level with Vuitton's bottom line: its pocketbooks.