My heart was all aflutter at a particularly outstanding fashion week in Paris. This is part one in a series I will be doing on PFW Spring 2013.
There were so many strong shows in Paris for the spring and then there was Hedi Slimane for Saint Laurent Paris. Hear ye, hear ye, that is the way to say it people. If you are referring to the house of YSL, it is Yves Saint Laurent. Do not speak about or write about Saint Laurent Paris. Got it? Got questions? Please refer to the PR team at Yves Saint Laurent or is it the PR team for Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane? Whoa! Did I forget a Paris in there?! Who knows!
I thought the show was a huge disappointment. I heard good things about the unseen resort collection by Slimane but I thought this looked like a watered down version of Saint Larent's greatest hits for H & M. Perhaps for a storied house like YSL, it needs to look forward, not backward. Reference the vocabulary of YSL but make it new, make it fresh, invent a new language. And one that we all want to speak.
And speaking of, I thought it was all very sad about the Cathy Horyn/ Hedi Slimane kerfluffle. A big design house like Yves Saint Laurent which voraciously needs six collections a year, bags, accessories - it is a lot. A designer will not only need to be enormously talented but also to have a big backbone. It is not name calling (as Mr. Slimane resorted to on his Twitter account about Ms. Horyn) but criticism and you have to be able to take it. Maybe you won't agree with it, maybe you can learn something from it but take it like a gentleman. Everyone has a job to do.
Look at Mr. Saint Laurent's enormously renowned - and scandalous - Forties Collection in the spring/summer of 1971. People were furious, outraged, scandalized. But who had the last laugh?!
"I did my collection as a kind of humorous protest (against the gypsy look), only everyone took it seriously. Then I became more sure of myself when I returned to my true style." Yves Saint Laurent
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| Spring 1971 haute couture "Forties" collection by Yves Saint Laurent at the Denver Art Museum |
not to mention it was so terribly heavy. though many collections often appear seasonless-this felt like cold cold weather. the hats were not good----at all. pgt
ReplyDeleteI agree. It was all so heavy and awkward. Just off. And the control he is trying to wield is so strange. Did you see the PR team sent out a note that only a certain few images of Slimane, which they released,
ReplyDeletecould be used? Odd.