The wonder and spectacle of style that is Haute Couture Fashion Week took place in Paris from the 4th – 7th of July 2022. The grand fashion event brought together 29 major brands to showcase their spectacular visions of what you could be wearing should you so choose, from the fall-winter season of 2022/23.
PFW HAUTE COUTURE ROUND-UP
Balenciaga is a trending topic on TikTok Nicole Kidman and Kim Kardashian walking the runway. Time to grab popcorn and save a chair for Naomi Campbell to discuss walks. Oh wait, she slew too, that day. However, there was a plethora of PVC looks for all ages.
Dior Haute Couture f / w 2022-23
It is a dress, finally, free from Instagram ability because here we don’t need to sell as much as to create an atmosphere. He can afford to shy away from the social gag: the absurd model, the jarring colours, the scandalous solutions made in the best possible way for false-virtuous examples of adhesions to the great themes of today. In other words, inclusiveness, body positivity, parity, bla-bla-bla (and very few curvy models on the catwalk). Starting with Dior – where Maria Grazia Chiuri offered her most moving and accurate collection since her arrival at the maison and not only for the infinite orchestration of beige, ivory, rope, sand, tea, and plaster but for the craftsmanship so painstaking as to be appreciated only up close and with the hands – ending with the valiant and optimistic reinterpretation of Coco’s codes by Virginie Viard, creative director of Chanel, without grandiloquent dresses but with many easy proposals because even the rich travel, there was time and space for reflection, the eternity of beauty, meditating on what a woman, even if rich, does not he really “needs” but “wants”.
Haute Couture Fashion Week
Often it looks to the past, but it also looks forwards to the future with certain brands like Balenciaga Iris Van Herpen and Three as Four.
Just because you’re an adult doesn’t mean one can’t be in a playful mood. Take a look at what Viktor and Rolf had to offer. Their vision showcased spectacular silhouettes, building upon the success and interest in their last season’s collection. Androgenous looks with enhanced shoulders were in play. What a performance that was.
Armani Privé worked within the narrative of a select colour palette of black, blue, grey, Fuschia, pink and white, entertaining us with its sumptuous fabrics.
Conceptual silhouettes of form and structure from Three as Four with Shingo Everard.
BALENCIAGA USES CELEBRITIES AS MODELS
Catwalk images from the Balenciaga Coutureshow, with its celebrity models, cast on hand to help out, including Nicole Kidman, Kim Kardashian, Dua Lipa, Bella Hadid and Naomi Campbell, while other celebrities watched.
Haute Couture fashion shows 2022-2023: the best photos.
Here: in the very elite high fashion, the dimension of reflection has entered, albeit with the due and proper differences between maison and maison. And it entered with the force of dominant discourse, precisely because for some time, there had been no runway shows that reflected so clearly the Zeitgeist, the air of the times. A complex chic current emerging in Paris, a definition coined by Elsa Schiaparelli to stimulate the search for a showy, sharp, angular elegance: narrower waist, sharper shoulders, and many black and shiny fabrics. In general, a graphic operation but also the assumption of responsibility for appearing as a programmatic statement.
Schiaparelli Haute Couture f / w 2022-23
Like Daniel Roseberry, creative director of Elsa Schiaparelli, he streamlined his silhouettes, showing black and white and a fair amount of leather (even if edged in gold in large quantities). But in the homage to those sharp shoulders, those marked hips already invented by Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Lacroix. There was the search for body-obsessed evening wear, all built around the bustier and corset. But it is a search that does not go in the direction of sensuality but in that of a sophisticated, eccentric discomfort. Even in the final dresses constructed as inverted flower pots, corollas and petals reconstructed with botanical meticulousness in the atelier, they seem more embalmed than just cut: beauty is always uncanny if it wants to mean something. Otherwise, having fun with cuteness is too, too easy. “Cute” is a term that both Elsa and Daniel loathe.
Fendi Haute Couture f / w 2022-23.
Moving forward to deal with the past
We have gone from a very repressive society to a hypersexualized society. We have the impression that revealing and showing everything makes us feel very free and liberated. In the end, the opposite is true: Roseberry’s tight-fitting suits, but above all, Demna Gvasalia’s backward journey – oops! Only Demna, now – in the second couture show for Balenciaga who started with non-binary sexuality “characters” completely covered in an elastic suit which seemed to be in black leather, including the face hidden by a disc of material used for sunglasses, bring back to the concept of imprisonment and constriction that finds its original sin in the corset and bustier. “The re-emergence of fetish fashion is partly a reaction to the lockdown”, says Professor Andrew Groves, who curated Undercover, an exhibition that retraced the use of the medical mask in public spaces. “For the past 18 months, we’ve all had a weird S&M relationship with the government,” he said, “which controlled our bodies, forcing us to wear masks and telling us who we can kiss or touch.
Adopting fetish clothing as a fashion can be interpreted as the desire to change the relationship, regain control and show them who is really in charge ». But for Balenciaga that of, the bustier is an element which serves to model a futuristic figurine on which to apply over, layer by layer, a dress with a crinoline so huge that it does not pass through the doors, an exquisitely tailored coat, a t-shirt with an “animated” hem because it has been doubled with aluminium foil. Supreme mockery of the bourgeois elements or new possibilities for dialogue between unmentionable practices and alternative forms of taste? What interests us here is how, from the first releases to the last, the ties have loosened, the knots have become bows, and the velvet has faded in the embroideries … Almost a necessary journey forward not to forget what is behind us.
Valentino haute couture f / w 2022-23.
The same trip that Pierpaolo Piccioli undertook with The Beginning, a great show in which he retraced his personal, intimate and professional relationship with his teacher, the now nonagenarian Valentino Garavani. Here too, a path that challenges and contradicts the chronological trend but first of all begins to free the body: first of all roses, red, Pink PPP, men’s couture that was brought by the creative director to the Roman maison which for the occasion reopened the doors of the first atelier in via Gregoriana. And then it continues with the ruffles, the bias, the red, the feathers, the white and black, the draperies, and the asymmetries that are a heritage of the house.
A master of atmospheres and a significant trigger of emotions, Pierpaolo Piccioli settled his accounts with his father, attesting to innocence (and not seduction) as a personal choice. And he did it gracefully: making a meadow of creations conceived under the sign of continuity but also of individuality blossom on the steps of Trinità de ‘Monti. This seems like a good wish: that’s why we hope that more people will talk about couture as a political art form and less and less in italics.
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