Paris Fashion Week, which ended on Tuesday, was overshadowed by the war in Ukraine. The fashion houses struggled to strike a balance between statements of solidarity and the glamor and spectacle of their shows.
Some offered heartfelt expressions of solidarity with the Ukrainian people alongside their fall/winter collections – none more so than Balenciaga designer Demna, who dropped his Gvasalia surname last December to separate his creative from his personal persona.
The designer, who was a fugitive himself during the civil war in his native Georgia in the early ’90s, admitted that against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, fashion week felt like “an absurdity”.
But he decided that canceling the show “would have been like surrendering to the evil that has hurt me so badly for almost 30 years.”
Demna recited a Ukrainian poem to open his show and placed T-shirts with the country’s blue and yellow flag on the seats for the audience.
Show canceled by Valentin Yudashkin
The French fashion federation, which urged guests to approach fashion week “with seriousness in the light of these dark hours,” canceled Russian designer Valentin Yudashkin’s final day’s show on Sunday for failing to publicly condemn the war.
“Our team wanted to see if he would distance himself like other artists. That was not the case,” the association’s president, Ralph Toledano, told AFP. Yudashkin, who has been showing his collections in Paris for years, previously helped design the latest uniforms for the Russian army.
Luxury houses have been reluctant to join other industries and sever ties with Russia in the face of profits coming from the country’s ultra-wealthy elite.
Some announced donations. Louis Vuitton, for example, donated one million euros for Ukrainian children. The company reported record sales of 64.2 billion euros for the past year.
Others focused on messages of peace. Stella McCartney opened her show with excerpts from President John F. Kennedy’s moving 1963 Cold War speech and ended with “Give Peace a Chance” by John Lennon, her father’s ex-bandmate.
armor
Some of the dresses this week looked oddly predictable, notably at Dior and Balmain, where the models appeared to be wearing bulletproof vests.
Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing explained that the gold shields and bulletproof vests came about because he was afraid of being trolled on the internet after suffering burns to his face in a domestic accident.
Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri said her own “protective” designs – including airbag corsets and vests with internal heating – reflected the fact that “the world was already at war before the invasion of Ukraine”.
“Covid was a different form of war. We’ve all had some very difficult months,” she told AFP.
Darker tones
This fashion week was supposed to celebrate the return to relative normalcy as pandemic restrictions eased and almost all houses went live again.
The screaming fans who gathered outside venues in Paris to greet the likes of Bella Hadid, Serena Williams and a heavily pregnant Rihanna were clearly in good spirits.
But world events notwithstanding, many designs tended to be rather dark anyway. Saint Laurent’s silky dresses, tailored suits and faux-fur coats were almost all pitch black.
Hermès, Rochas, Givenchy, Isabel Marant – all opted for largely monochrome and somber colors.
Even US designer Rick Owens, whose show Vice praised as “transcendental,” made changes. His wild, apocalyptic designs are usually accompanied by deafening techno and industrial noise. This time, however, he opted for Mahler’s Fifth Symphony: “A piece that I would have found too sentimental in the past, but that better suits the sobriety and search for hope in our current situation,” says the designer. (AFP)
This article was previously published on FashionUnited.uk. Translation and editing: Barbara Russ.