They were the two new kids on the block at Paris couture this week. On the one hand Chanel’s Matthieu Blazy and Dior’s Jonathan Anderson are, at 41, highly experienced fashion professionals.
They’ve been working their way up the designer hierarchy for a couple of decades. But now they are at the very top, ensconced as of last year as creative directors at the two most esteemed fashion houses in the business, they have gone through the looking glass into another world – the world of couture. They are fashion’s Alices, and what a wonderland they have found themselves in.
Couture is something different, as they each admitted to me backstage at their respective shows. They talked with palpable excitement about getting to work with the greatest technicians in fashion; about getting to helm of what amounts to fashion’s version of a Formula 1 racing car. Because that’s the strange thing about couture; it’s built on tradition, but at its best it’s about remarkable innovation, akin to – as Anderson put it to me – “a laboratory that you use to put out ideas.”
Both men almost swooned over the technical mastery they were being exposed to for the first time. “These are people who have an expertise I don’t have,” said Blazy, eyes sparkling. “It is such a great adventure for me and I have already learnt so much.”
“There might be a three-hour fitting for one jacket,” said Anderson, at once disbelieving and delighted. “I didn’t learn to make a jacket like that in school. There might,” he continued, “be 12 different toiles,” referring to the calico prototypes that are created in order to finesse a design before it is rendered in the final (expensive) fabric. “It’s such an enjoyable process. It’s all about the make. It reminds you why you went into fashion.”
This is a realm in which everything is produced by hand by highly skilled artisans known as petites mains; in which a dress can take months to deliver and cost a six-figure sum; in which only a few of the most illustrious and – often, though not always – most storied brands take part.
Couture is a prefigurement of the industrialization of fashion, when clothes were made for you and you alone, by someone you paid if you had the money, or by you or someone in your family if you didn’t. Even the clothes on the ready-to-wear runways, with their price tags that start at around four figures and often go far higher, are, in truth, akin to fast fashion in disguise.
“Couture works to its own timings,” is how Blazy put it. “The timings of the atelier.” He paused. “And the air in the room is so joyful.”
“There is no sound in the atelier, no machinery, just people working in silence,” Anderson told me, going on to note that those people have a sense of ownership, of pride, that isn’t found to the same degree elsewhere in fashion. “A dress that took three months… for the person who worked on it to see it finished, that is a big deal.”
From both designers we saw fantasies worthy of Lewis Carroll, not least in their respective Wonderland-ish mise en scènes. At Dior thousands of cyclamen appeared to grow upside down from a mossy ceiling. At Chanel giant pink mushrooms looked positively psychedelic. Theirs were topsy-turvy universes, and they played with gravity – in both senses of the word – with clothes too.
Both returned again and again in our conversations to the notion of ‘lightness;’ of how to deliver the specialness of couture without the structures – and indeed strictures – of yore. Both interrogated what could (and couldn’t) be couture. Could a jumper be couture, asked Anderson. Could a pair of jeans be couture, asked Blazy.
Definitively yes. Blazy’s denim was, in fact, blue mousseline, so delicate to be almost immaterial. He used that same whisper of a fabric to riff on the flapper-girl lines first drawn in the early decades of the last century by Gabrielle Chanel. It was the same, but so very, very different. He presented evening wear that seemed to explode like fireworks; little black dresses (and suits) that, as Chanel herself once memorably put it, “wipe out everything else around.” The craftsmanship was breathtaking, from the buttons that looked more like fine jewellery than mere fastenings to the co-ords covered in shaved mother of pearl.
Blazy didn’t put a foot wrong. From the front row it was a unanimous yes. Anderson trod less of a straight path. Was it too difficult to be Dior, some asked. Too challenging? I didn’t think so. There was much that I loved, as he took the language of flowers that lies at the heart of Christian Dior’s creations in the 1940s and ’50s and made it look edgy, even iconoclastic.
Besides, as Anderson himself pointed out, “We think now that what Christian Dior did in the 1940s and 50s was classicism, but at the time people were often confused by it.” It’s easy to forget that the New Look of 1947 caused nothing less than a furore, prompting newspaper headlines across the globe.
In a collection that felt like the essence of spring, there were dresses that presented like a herbaceous border, skirts, and bags like pieces of turf. As well as the red-carpet-ready floorsweepers, there were slouchy layered up separates that came across as grungy, but also beyond chic.
“It’s very intimidating to do a job like this,” said Anderson. “You know you are going up against people who are in the history books.” On this week’s evidence, neither he nor Blazy worry about that.
“The world is harsh,” said his counterpart at Chanel. “I wanted this couture show to be a break, a kind of poetic parenthesis.” It was, Matthieu, it was. And that, more than anything, is what couture is about.
