Anthony Vaccarello‘s YSL was powerful, but youth and strength were the winners.
The difference between two creative minds at the opening the Paris shows was dramatic.
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For Marine Serre it was a burning psychedelic moon scorching regenerated knitwear while the audience sat on ancient Turkish carpets.
At Saint Laurent, a ball of light in the intense darkness followed each model, whose tailored jackets were as bourgeois and correct as the latex stretch tights on their legs was subversively sexy.
Backstage, designer Anthony Vaccarello defined his designs as “discipline and pleasure” - with a dash of perversity.
The two creative sources produced powerful collections that explored - not just aesthetic but deep cultural difference.
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Marine Serre, 28, speaks for her own youthful generation, forced to face up to issues caused by an older generation. Or as she defined it,“tumbling deep down the futurist wormhole,” (without forgetting a reusable drinking bottle) into a new world of hunter-gatherers.
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For Vaccarello it was about remembering Yves Saint Laurent in the Nineties, when the renowned designer had become more bourgeois than streetwise - and to give that era a twist of perversity.
“I wanted to reproduce the original fabrics of the Nineties - all the tweed, silk and cashmere - and to twist those luxurious materials with something cheap like latex,” the designer explained.
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Such different attitudes were behind the two collections. Both had vision and power, but when it came to a spine- tingling moment so rarely felt in current fashion, Marine Serre came out on top.o
Marine Serre: New Generation Rising
The 28-year-old designer managed to produce a scary kind of beauty, where a head was covered, with a patch of lace for the eyes to see, and the rest of the body in feminine, but striking pieces of what looked like cut-up nightwear.
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For the first time, the designer focused on tailoring, a houndstooth check tracing the body from shoulders to ankles. Part of its fabric was re-used - or “re-generated” as the designer dynamically puts it.
"Fifty per cent of what you saw today is made from upcycling,” said Marine Serre.
“We work with what is already there - and we can be extremely creative with that too. I think it’s really important to see these resources."
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The exceptional skill of this designer is that her “new lamps for old” are not just about recycling but also express fears for the future.
She talked about the moon - her fetish since the start of her career - but this time “the moon dry, burning like wood”. The colours - scorching orange, sand and leaf green - suggesting jeans dug up from the sand and a forest fire raging.
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It is rare thing to find a prophet in the fashion world. And even more so one who makes such striking, intriguing and modern clothes.
Saint Laurent: Celebrating A Woman’s Power
“I didn’t want to bring sex to the collection, I just wanted to bring attention to the bourgeois style of Saint Laurent in the Nineties, but to take that moment and twist it with something younger, less bourgeois and much less classy,” the designer said.
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That last comment was certainly true of the latex leggings in crude colours - magenta, azure, scarlet and purple. Those shades were in tune with the jewel coloured jackets, unusual for a designer passionate for black.
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The effect was striking - a little of the feeling of actress Catherine Deneuve in 1960s' film Belle de Jour where a correct young woman had a hidden life in a brothel, except that today’s models walked the runway boldly and freely in an image of modern times. Inevitably in the backstage conversation, the subject of Harvey Weinstein’s guilty conviction came up.
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How did that fit with dominatrix stretch lycra?
“I think my woman has the power to do what she wants to do,” said Anthony Vaccarello.
“She’s not in submission. She’s powerful. And she’s taking control."
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