Fashion Garments

Can clothes ever be art? Paris haute couture week seems a good moment to get to the bottom of this one. (The dresses at haute ­couture start at £20,000, so I can’t pass the time shopping, and am thus forced into the highbrow by ­default.) Artistic vision and value is one of the justifications given for the utterly illogical persistence of this ­insanely expensive and unapologetically exclusive branch of fashion – in which elaborate catwalk shows are staged in order to showcase a collection whose eventual orders are unlikely to ever reach triple figures. “It’s a work of art!” is the fallback backstage cliche of ­couture (at ready-to-wear, designers have to be happy with a mere ­”fabulous!”). What’s more, Galliano et al are not the only ones concerned with clothes and art in Paris right now. ­Under the towering glass roof of the Grand Palais, French artist Christian Boltanski’s installation, Personnes, ­addresses questions of fate, death and God, using 50 tonnes of old clothes, borrowed from charity shops, to which they will be returned when the exhibition ends.

Let’s start with the pretty stuff, shall we? On Tuesday morning, in an old bank building on the Rue Cambon, Karl Lagerfeld closed his show for Chanel with a bride and groom. The young woman was wearing a heart-shaped chignon under her veil, with silver gloves and boots matching the mercury brightness of her beau’s suit, her gown a column of satin in an ivory just tinged with the faintest pink. The colours, Lagerfeld said, came to him in a dream. It had taken 200 hours of work to fashion the airy cape out of 200m of tulle, and 350 hours in the Maison Lesage specialist embroidery atelier to embroider the sequins, pearls and crystals onto the front, back and sleeves of the dress. That it’s gorgeous goes without saying. But is it art? What does it mean? After the show, one journalist mentioned that the silver and neon colours looked futuristic. “I hate that,” replied Lagerfeld frostily. “I don’t believe in avant-garde clothes for a future that will never happen. Fashion is always now.”

Much has already been written about Boltanski’s installation – Adrian Searle said that Boltanski “deals in traces rather than ghosts . . . photographs of the dead and piles of old clothes. His art, ultimately, is a memorial to nothing, to everyone and no one.” I’m no art critic, so I won’t test your patience with my views, but what struck me when I visited Personnes was how Boltanski has made these piles of crumpled jackets and faded skirts convey such an intense sadness. Spectators walk slowly between rows of face-down coats as if visiting a ­cemetery. Anyone has has ever opened a box and found their children’s forgotten baby clothes, faded and limp but vivid with nostalgia, knows how old clothes can make you feel a bit sad; Boltanski takes this to a new level.

I go to the Grand Palais frequently, because there are often fashion shows there. Dressed for a catwalk show, with rows of banked seating creating a feeling of togetherness and a state-of-the-art sound system to ramp up the excitement, it is a place of heart-lifting beauty, especially when the sun shines. Yes, it is always cold in winter, but designers have ways of getting around this problem. (I still have the fine-wool shawl that was considerately left on each seat, the year Dior did a winter show there. I’m not entirely sure whether we were supposed to take them home or not but, come on, what would you have done?) When I went to see Personnes, the sky through the glass roof was a gorgeous silky pale blue, the exact shade of a little girl’s hair ribbon in a Renoir portrait. And yet with the clothes flat and lifeless on the floor and in one monstrously large, bonfire-shaped heap, the place made me shiver, and not just from cold.

Haute couture has to make you feel something too. Like jewellery, haute couture is an emotional purchase – which is a smart business model, frankly, because for that kind of money if you were so-so about what you were looking at it you’d most likely pass. Unexpectedly, it seems to me that the emotion that haute couture is trying to evoke at the moment in its target customers is frequently a ­feeling not of inspiration, but of comfort. There are still women out there with the money to buy this stuff – I’ve seen them with my own eyes – but in the last decade their demographic has been changing at a lightning rate. Amazing to think, now, that not so long ago having Americans on the front row, rather than just lots of ­incredibly haughty Parisienne ­madames and mademoiselles with more de las in their name than a French grammar textbook, was considered rather ­arriviste. Now, the Americans have come and gone, and the few remaining Russians regard the new Indian front-row regulars, now beginning to greet each other as old friends, with seen-it-all-before expressions. That there is a burgeoning clientele in China for luxury fashion has been as evident on the catwalk as on the front row – or is it just me who finds it ­remarkable, that at the very point when China ­becomes the new prize market, so very many designers are simultaneously inspired by Shanghai? – but the Middle Eastern clients are the ones to snare, right now. Frankly, if you’re not opening a fancy flagship store in Beirut this year, you’re toast.

On the catwalk this week, there was a noticeable collective shift toward a silvery-pearlescent-spangly look. Chanel had veins of liquid-mercury silver edging lemon-yellow short suits; Armani had mother-of-pearl toned suits, and woven-silver gowns encrusted with crystals. Armani, ­naturally, said the inspiration “came to me when I was watching the moon rise over my holiday home”. (”Looking at spreadsheets of what colours sell well in Lebanon” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? PS ­Giorgio – that’s a joke.) I’m worried about the spangly silver look becoming a trend, because in lesser hands it will very quickly look a little bit Dubai, but here it was beautiful. Anne Hathaway, one of Armani’s front-row guests, gushed after seeing the designer’s latest dresses that, “I have a few events in mind, and if Mr Armani would be generous enough, I’d love to wear them.”

I went to see the Armani Prive collection up close the day after the show, in the salon on the Avenue Montaigne. If haute couture is on its last legs, then you wouldn’t know it from the scene I found there: the bell rang every few minutes, the moonshine collection was admired and the client discreetly flattered, and the unmistakable dollar-bill rustle of order sheets being signed off seemed to follow sure as night follows day. No wonder Gucci is apparently about to launch a made-in-Paris couture line. (Incidentally, on Sunday, Gucci sent an email to editors announcing proudly that Penelope Cruz was to wear the first-ever Gucci couture gown to the Screen Actors Guild awards that evening. Hours later, a follow-up email said that due to “a last-minute tailoring issue” Penelope did not wear the dress. How I would have loved to be a fly on that dressing-room wall . . .)

When I was ready to leave Armani, a young assistant opened the cloakroom door for me to retrieve my coat. There before me was a wall-to-wall parade of fur. In between a sumptuous floor-length mink and a sleek bomber-style jacket in sheared fox was the only non-fur in the cupboard: my navy wool coat, frowsy in this context. It was a strange sight, sad and funny at the same time. Clothes may not be art, but they can make you think.

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/28/paris-haute-couture-fashion-art