Chanel went back to the timeless glamor of black and white Hollywood movies while Louis Vuitton embraced a gender neutral future on the last day of Paris fashion week Tuesday.
An army of the world’s top supermodels walked under a huge Hollywood-style sign spelling out Chanel’s name in its biggest catwalk spectacle since designer Virginie Viard took over the fabled French house from Karl Lagerfeld after his death last year.
They included the body positive pin-up, Jill Kortleve, the Dutch model who is a voluptuous size 16 (US size 12).
Photo: AFP
COVID-19 restrictions may have limited the number of fashionistas allowed into the immense Grand Palais in central Paris, but like the decor, Viard wrote her ambitions large.
Her collection was no less than a grand sweep through the long history of the label founded by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, with a giant nod to Chanel’s time in Tinseltown in the 1930s when she dressed stars like Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich and Gloria Swanson.
“I was thinking of actresses on the red carpet... some of whom we haven’t seen in a long time... their faces a little somewhere else as the photographers call out to them,” Viard said afterwards.
The show — dominated by black and white interspersed with splashes of bold color — coincides with the first-ever museum exhibition dedicated to Coco Chanel in the French capital, which opened last week to rave reviews.
BIG SCREEN GLAMOR
Viard recreated and updated some of Coco’s most beloved looks, with a nod to her predecessor Lagerfeld’s more street fashion sensibility with logos a gogo.
“Gabrielle Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld dressed so many actresses in their films and in their lives,” Viard added. “They made us dream.”
“Without redoing clothes exactly and falling into vintage, I wanted it to be very joyous and colourful and full of life.”
With Paris fashion week forced largely online by the coronavirus, Chanel streamed the show live for fashion fans.
“Lights, cameras, action!” it declared on Instagram as it aped the opening of a silent black and white film, placing a huge Chanel sign on the Hollywood Hills.
Viard kept up the theme of the brand’s long association with the silver screen with video clips of models reclining in luxury hotels like movie idols about to attend premieres.
The brand’s association with Hollywood began in 1930 when studio mogul Sam Goldwyn begged Coco Chanel to come to Los Angeles to give his stable of stars some “class”, offering her US$1 million to come twice a year.
VUITTON’S STILETTO CLOGS
While Chanel looked back, Nicolas Ghesquiere’s Louis Vuitton could not be more resolutely now, with the opening look a sweater emblazoned with “Vote”, a rallying call for the liberal left in the upcoming US presidential election.
But that was as conventionally political as it got, with the highly rated French designer insisting that his eyes were set firmly on the possibilities that gender fluid clothes might offer in the future.
“What cut might dissolve the masculine and the feminine?” he asked. “What wardrobe might make them come together in one?”
Ghesquiere said he wanted to bring the world’s richest luxury label on a “voyage of exploration... to discover and abolish the last [gender] frontiers.”
The bravura show was held in the long-closed La Samaritaine department store, which is due to reopen next year.
As always with Ghesquiere, it was all in the cut, with classic business and streetwear uniforms given surprising turns. But perhaps the most eye-catching thing about his spring-summer 2021 collection were the shoes, with a line of pointed clog stilettos sending Instagram into spasms.
Taiwan’s English education system is being pulled apart by three opposing forces. Bilingual Nation 2030 pulls students toward English and global communication. Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness pulls them toward digital judgment, verification and AI-mediated work. But Taiwan’s old exam culture pulls them back toward memorization, grammar drills, timed reading and correct answers. If the education system keeps using old exams to define success, it risks producing graduates who are neither genuinely bilingual nor genuinely AI-ready, but trained for tasks machines can already perform. The first force is Bilingual Nation 2030. Launched in 2018, the policy aimed to “help Taiwan’s workforce connect
It seems every few days one bumps into one of those “real man” comments in which Taiwan is urged to “face reality” or similar, and “make a deal,” with the speaker implying that soon it will be too late. “Deal” advocates always present themselves as having a superior grip on reality, and the manly ability to make the “hard choice.” Their testosterone-laden language often echoes that of Taiwan sellout advocates. Note that such commentary always specifies a process (“make a deal, work with, make progress”), never the end state of what occupation by a violent authoritarian colonialist state will entail. In
June 1 to June 7 "If all Taiwanese were as afraid of dying as you, then what would happen?” Physician Shih Chiang-nan (施江南) reportedly said this to his wife Chen Chiao-tung (陳焦桐) after she urged him to stop intervening on behalf of Taiwanese soldiers stranded overseas after serving in the Japanese Army during World War II. Shih had clashed with high-ranking officials over the issue, engaged in several heated arguments with Taiwan governor-general Chen Yi (陳儀) and allegedly shouted at general Ko Yuan-fen (柯遠芬), chief of staff of the Taiwan Garrison Command, over
“Taiwan’s Opposition Leader Comes to US With a Message Straight Out of Beijing” read a May 31 headline in the Wall Street Journal. Top US administration officials and members of Congress almost certainly read the WSJ, and if there was a bullet point takeaway that people in Washington should absorb ahead of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) arrival in DC on June 9, that headline is it. The last few columns have discussed this very topic, and the timing is not coincidental. While those top officials likely do not read the Taipei Times, judging by the number
RSS