Paris Fashion Week SS27: Part 2
Somewhere Between Fantasy and Reality
From Sarah Burton's wardrobe of everyday luxuries at Givenchy to Alessandro Michele's extravagant world at Valentino, Paris Fashion Week continued to explore the space between the clothes we live in and those we dream of wearing.
Issey Miyake has always understood that clothes really come alive when they move and Satoshi Kondo made that relationship between body and fabric the starting point this season, opening with a rather beautiful performance choreographed by Tess Voelker. Dancers pulled, stretched and wrestled with vast expanses of fabric, celebrating its lightness while also exposing the tension that exists between cloth and the body.
Staged in an almost entirely black space, with a reflective floor mirroring the models as they walked, the setting made the collection’s incredible colour palette feel even more electric. Satoshi put out clothes that billowed, bounced and twisted around the body: pleats trapped pockets of air, translucent organza appeared almost weightless and ballooning silhouettes seemed to breathe as they moved.
For a brand so technically driven, there was something wonderfully instinctive about it all. You didn’t necessarily need to understand the engineering of it all to appreciate the simple pleasure of watching fabric truly move.
Eighty looks and not a single doubt as to who designed them. Alessandro Michele’s Valentino SS27 celebrated elegance and extravagance, at times tipping gleefully into costume.
Staged amongst the bookshelves of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, guests were encouraged to arrive book in hand, later donated to public libraries – part of Alessandro’s idea of the “antilibrary”, celebrating what we don’t yet know and the possibilities that lie within it. The same thinking extended to the clothes. Across 80 looks there was seemingly no desire to edit down Alessandro’s world; instead, more was resolutely more.
And perhaps that’s the point. While much of this season has had us thinking about wearability, Valentino offered the counterargument. Not every extraordinary dress needs to slot neatly into everyday life. Sometimes fashion’s job is simply to make that life, or another entirely, a little more imaginable.
MIU MIU
The energy was back at Miu Miu this season, and with all those sportswear references, it certainly needed it. Miuccia Prada took the clothes of the everyday wardrobe and put them through the Miu Miu machine, setting performance jerseys, vintage denim and technical trainers against tailoring, pleated skirts, silk bows and embroidered eveningwear. We especially loved that prints were brought back after too many normcore seasons of khaki.
The fun was in that friction. Sports tops were cropped and layered over and under other pieces, denim was pulled together with crossed lacing, while deliberately creased and aged fabrics prevented anything from feeling too pristine. Even the collaborations leaned into the theme, with vintage Wrangler jeans reworked for the runway and New Balance’s 150-gram racing shoe given the Miu Miu treatment.
And, as ever, the casting was part of the entertainment: Olivia Colman, Jamie Bell and Gigi Hadid all joined the line-up for a delighted audience’s beady eyes. After a few seasons where the Miu Miu formula had perhaps started to feel familiar, SS27 felt like someone had turned the pace back up.
Sarah Burton’s Givenchy SS27 felt like a culmination of the vocabulary she has been building at the French house, where she first worked alongside Alexander McQueen decades ago. And what a convincing one it was.
Sarah herself is a woman of denim and perfectly tailored jackets, and there’s something refreshing about a designer whose own wardrobe reflects the lives of the women she dresses. A red satin jacket, painstakingly perfected by the atelier, was paired with straight-cut jeans, a rather brilliant statement of intent for the Givenchy of today. Extraordinary craftsmanship, without the expectation that it be saved for extraordinary occasions.
Elsewhere, a myriad of bags designed by accessories maestro Marco de Vincenzo made an equally convincing case for the house’s growing leather goods offering. It all added up to a collection of pieces worth investing in, not simply admiring. Sarah seems to understand that the best clothes are the ones we actually want to live in.
