Chanel Spring 2022 Ready-to-Wear Collection

Chanel Spring 2022 Ready-to-Wear Collection

Back at the turn of the 1990s, as listeners to the podcast In Vogue: The 1990s will discover, supermodels came bounding down the high, raised runways exuding joie de vivre as they twirled and vamped for the photographers who had jostled for prime position, not only in the mosh pit at the end of the runway, but all along its length. (The front-row seats were still prized in fashion’s hierarchy, but generally gave one a fantastic view of the back of a photographer or a supermodel’s nostrils.)

“I used to love the sound of flashbulbs going off at the shows in the ’80s,” designer Virginie Viard recalled in today’s Chanel show notes. “I wanted to recapture that emotion.” So this season Viard attempted to channel that energy and joy in a collection that not only referenced the era in the clothes, staging, and accessories (purses shaped like N°5 bottles; piratically flared Louis heels), but even the soundtrack: Witness George Michael’s anthemic “Freedom! ’90”—in a contemporary cover version by Christine and the Queens—getting the models in the party spirit.

While the Grand Palais, scene of so many elaborately staged Chanel spectaculars, undergoes an epic renovation (generously underwritten by Chanel), this collection was presented in a temporary space, set up in the shadow of Les Invalides, which allowed Viard to recapture the memory of the shows she had thrilled to when she was a fashion neophyte.

At the end of the raised runway, for instance, the photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, now deeply enmeshed in the Chanel world, played old-school show photographers, snapping the models who stopped to pose and preen for them and seemed to be having the time of their lives, flashing smiles and flicking hair rather than assuming the habitual look of sulky disdain. Inez & Vinoodh also provided the playful videos (presented in an anteroom before entering the show space) that depicted the stars of Chanel’s model cabal—among them Lily-Rose Depp, Alma Jodorowsky, Rebecca Dayan, and Quannah Chasinghorse—turning the camera on them. Photography, after all, is in the DNA of the brand.

The show also opened à la Karl Lagerfeld—who sent shock waves when he put Chanel-branded underwear as outerwear on the runway for spring 1993—with a black-and-white sequence of briefs, swimsuits, and sports bras, occasionally veiled in spangled black net pants or shown with above-the-knee skirts. During an accessories fitting a couple of days before the show, Viard pointed out the crocheted effects she had worked on with braid company Bacus, and the spin on the bright spring pastel tweed suits—think of Chanel-clad Naomi, Linda, and Carla, shot by Steven Meisel for Vogue, March 1994—that she had given the twist of a longer skirt or jacket flap in back, suggesting a traditional tailcoat.

“Karl was always doing fake jeans,” recalled Viard, shuddering at the memory. “In the ’90s they always seemed to be with pink tweed—ugh! For me it was horrible then, but now j’adore!”

Her own reimagined denim propositions this season included a pretty, summery deck-chair ticking stripe cut into stiff little 1960s-looking dresses with bold bands of black sequins, creating the trompe l’oeil illusion of a classic Chanel cardigan suit, and charcoal denim wafted with a butterfly print. Those butterfly wings were amplified as prints on drifting chiffon pieces that swirled as the girls twirled, providing another charming throwback to a moment that celebrated the happiness the fashion flock is feeling in a season of cautious reemergence and optimism.

Miu Miu Spring 2022 Ready-to-Wear Collection

Imagine being in your mid-twenties when the pandemic hit, just about to make your debut on the corporate scene; your pressed skirt suit, ironed shirt and unwrapped nylons left abandoned in your closet for what felt like an eternity. When the world reopens and WFH is replaced with IRL, will you pull out that dusty uniform as if nothing happened? Or did something change within you? For Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu customer of the 2020s, it’s a no-brainer. When it comes to the age groups whose formative experiences were interrupted by the lockdown period, continuing on the same track as the generations before them is no longer a given.

If the seismic events of the last year-and-a-half taught young people anything, it’s to question those values, norms, and, indeed, dress codes. When the Miu Miu woman returns to the office, she’s chopping up all of those preordained rules, quite literally. Today, Prada marked her own return to the office—i.e. the Palais d’Iéna where the Miu Miu show traditionally takes place—by seating her guests in ergonomic work chairs and treating us to a back-to-work wardrobe for the post-pandemic age. Like rebellious private school kids cutting up their uniforms, she shortened the length of corporate skirts and tops—frayed edges in tow—until there was barely anything left to crop.

It was as if waistlines and skirt hems—and necklines and top hems—had a magnetic attraction to one another, drawing ever closer as the show progressed. Midriffs were elongated to a degree that would have made Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera collectively blush in the early 2000s, if, of course, the very sight of those low-riding baggy trousers wouldn’t have made them faint first. In the process, miniskirts migrated into top territory and morphed into belted bandeaus, and someone came to work in just a beige bra and a matching pencil skirt, the elastic band of her underwear poking out. All this, mind you, in the fabrics of a businesswoman’s wardrobe.

It was a kind of normcore for an abnormal world. Prada hasn’t been doing post-show interviews this season due to Covid-19, but she did grace us with a few well-chosen words: “It’s so normal, but for me it’s so strange. Strange is not strange anymore,” she said with a shrug, and toiled on with her celebrity greetings. Certainly the new generations seem unfazed by the overt sexiness of the post-lockdown mentality. Forget about Casual Fridays—in 2022, it’s all about Freaky Fridays, and Karen from IT Support has rolled up her merino jumper so you can see her six-pack.

In case there are any apprehensive dressers left in this ‘new sexy’ climate, Prada did throw in some very viable new alternatives to the corporate wardrobe. Cable knit skirts with high slits worn with shirts and faded oversized knits made for a realistic take on ‘the generational suit,’ as did a stone-washed leather blouson with a matching box-pleat skirt. And should those Freaky Fridays ever turn into Formal Fridays—gosh, how archaic—the chopped and tattered idea of it all was applied to some lavishly embellished dresses and suits rendered in the most beautiful smoky palette.

Prada’s winding white runway was lined with lens-shaped screens on which two comedy pieces directed by the Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani were shown. One saw a businesswoman surreally arguing with documents that had come to life (“May God curse you with the sharpest scissors!”). Another was an amusing conversation between Moroccan women making fun of the latest trends in plastic surgery (“They take fat from the thighs and inject it in the butt”—“OK, so it’s Halal!”). What was it Prada said? “Strange is not strange anymore.”

Givenchy Spring 2022 Ready-to-Wear Collection

This January, Matthew M. Williams will show his first haute couture collection for Givenchy. “It’s been drawn; we’ve just started the toiles,” he revealed during a preview for his first live show with an audience since he joined the house at the start of the pandemic. Underpinned by his couture aspirations, his third ready-to-wear collection was like a release of grandiose proportions: a massive explosion of ideas and ambitions bottled up for too long, until finally the cork popped.

Inside the gargantuan La Défense Arena, Williams erected a proportionately giant oval light structure in which some 70 models traversed and intersected with military panache. The vastness was Young Thug’s idea. He recorded an original soundtrack for the show (quite catchy), and only a stadium experience would do. “Having everyone see it in real life definitely informed what you’re going to see today,” said Williams, and his intentions were clear.

Tackling an amplified 1940s silhouette—sculpted shoulders, nipped-in waists—he worked the fabrication and surface decoration of every garment to inextricable degrees, turning up the impact factor of looks so you could literally see the details from across the arena. Scanty bloomers erupted in unyielding ruffles; column dresses were encrusted with thick, rustling mega-sequins; and bolstered bolero jackets took shape through dense micro-plissé structures.

“The pieces are really, really worked and complex,” said Williams, his mind clearly in couture world already. In many ways, the collection felt like a precursor to the idea of doing couture. It manifested in zealous design value, which often made for rigid and constricting-looking constructions like knee-high dominatrix clog boots, as well as tight neoprene tailored jackets harnessed tonally in deconstructed corsetry or implanted with resolute peplums poking out from their hips.

Williams collaborated with New York artist Josh Smith, interpreting his semi-abstract paintings through his own textural lens, working motifs of containers painted with clowns and words into the surface of his signature vulcanized jeans, or those of scary balloon smileys into ripped leggings. “Josh has a much different aesthetic than I have: lots of color and brightness. It was a nice opportunity to emerge out of my comfort zone and explore a new space,” said Williams.

The creative dialogue between the two was expressed most eloquently in a series of Smith’s paintings—which Williams said portrayed the Grim Reaper—adapted into intricate knitwear and leather tops, some overlaid in filters of transparent fabrics printed with similar motifs, creating a kind of illusion within the styling. Those looks were “just” streetwear, but they represented Williams’s passion for texture from its most compelling side. At a time when streetwear designers are becoming couturiers, Williams will do well to use his couture ateliers for poised experimentation like this.