Louis Vuitton Spring 2023 Ready-to-wear

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Cathy Horyn 2014 on Ghesquière’s LV debut: 

“Even Nicolas Ghesquière, with his much-anticipated first collection for Louis Vuitton, showed wearable styles with polish: trim coats, ’60s-cut minis, modest accessories. And that’s not what people expect from Ghesquière, who for most of his 15 years at Balenciaga created a genuine stir. There, he developed cutting-edge materials and artful interpretations of archive looks. What struck me about the Vuitton show was Ghesquière’s comment that he listened to what women around him wanted to wear. Did he care before?”

But the pannier experiments of the past few collections are finally “Ghesquière” again. His abstracted farthingale rolls in Vachetta leather: gawky, disastrously luxurious. This brand of hard edge chic to unite both hipsters and patricians alike.

Olivier Theyskens Spring 2023 Ready-to-wear

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We can no longer stomach the smell of freshly minted Fabric. Fabric’s loom of mass manufacture a leitmotif for Kapitalism’s Svengali trade. the valorization of humanity’s bleakest labor fracking entire regions through the goop of polyurethane and spoiled cotton. We try deny the loom through its degradation: reworking rags, patchworking deadstock, boiling, cooking, burying, soiling. The irregular twists of patching bias cut fabric as contra to smooth machinic flow. The poesis of crumbling production mills only to be worn by Karlie Kloss on red carpets: Theyskens’ melancholy. 

Balenciaga Spring 2023 Ready-to-wear

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That people only now understanding Balenciaga not some clairvoyant, oracle. That its here the emperor declothed? last Resort 2023 gimps parade the NYSE trading floor. the message? “Money is Fetish.” The team gather around Denma chewing in suasible awe. The metaphor so dumb blunt it makes Tim Gunn and Colin McDowell sound like savants. Remember Rachel Tashjian’s Resort 2023 defense as something like “WOAH denma embraces money and power—no other artist dares do that!”  

The brand’s hot takes pile the cognitive window display. shopping for cultural commentary to make meaning easy. And the clothes themselves now boring, cheap. Do even drip influencers still wear these? the profitable trading strategy in disposable irony itself disposable. 

Kiko Kostadinov Spring 2023 Ready-to-wear

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“catnip for it-girls everywhere”. The Kiko customer, saccharine hipsters with less disposable income than Philo’s, more than Vaquera’s. CSM productification for sure. The school merchandised in bite size Ssence confectionery. We accessorize these to feel bubbly, piquant, without jeopardizing a Grayson Perry/Anna Piaggi harlequinade. Glass blown gems, twisted design lines, fine chains, paisley mohair. Their 70s spacewear now with a 40s film noir. Kiko’s pretty product genrelessness an ascension to the Marc Jacobs throne? (or just Heaven?)

Comme des Garçons Spring 2023 Ready-to-wear

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“In the modern age clothing has become man’s second skin, from which he will under no pretext separate himself and which belongs to him like an animal’s coat, so that nowadays the real form of the body has been quite forgotten” (Théophile Gautier 1860)

But this is no second skin: clothing so monstrously baroque it mocks our sartorial rectitude of health and classicism. Rei’s Lumps and Bumps (1992) first expressed the profound disjuncture between dress and the body. That, despite our tendency to naturalize clothing, over time it inevitably appears wholly alien; strange anthropological studies. Then in 2012, 20 years on, her flat manifesto collections saw the body under renewed attack. Asphyxiating felt steamrolling limbs and compressing lungs; clothing winning the dialectical war. And by ~2015, Rei abandoned the anatomy altogether, jettisoning the saleable sweet jetsam of Shirt, Play, Tricot, Homme et al. CdG runway pieces stripped of armholes with necks built high above transmogrify their host. Acephalic giant laceballs with drooping relapsed glands. The body not forgotten, but obliterated. monstrous Beauty.

Rick Owens Spring 2023 Ready-to-wear

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Has there ever been more homosexual clothes? A sort of high camp intergalactic emperor in stripper platforms. But where rick excels is always his more undisclosed sculptural figurations (look 32,33). Boulders of cloth that defy the human figure. 

Courrèges Spring 2023 Ready-to-wear

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Nicolas Di Felice, Yolanda Zobe, Sébastien Meyer, Arnaud Vaillant. We cant help resuscitate dead corpses. resuscitate old houses like a desiccated money tree shaken to death. 

Remember the aesthetico-political revolution of Spaceage (Gernrich, Cardin)? An attempt to bring us closer to fashion’s “pure form.” Of geometric planes & techno assimilation. This streamlined ready-to-wear minimalism a new theory of mass-production: That the all-purpose unisex uniform might be fashion’s social democratic utopia. The destruction of couture. This why Cristóbal despised his former apprentice André Courrèges…but it's Telfar (maybe Yeezy?) not Courrèges who explores this condition today, using the aesthetic regime of mass-production as departure point... Instead Di Felice does Coachella clubgear for the parvenue.

Acne Spring 2023 Ready-to-wear

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Has always looked like Fashion. A mise en abyme of moodboards within moodboards. Acne, COS, Zara. An infinite white cyc to spawn the great blob of looks. Haley Wollens a pure symptom.

Saint Laurent Spring 2023 Ready-to-wear

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Genuine billionaires wear these. Gated away from parochial Purple Lucien downtowners and Broken Arm cadre. Bill Blassesque for an era of stupendous wealth divide. What’s not to love even Omahyra Mota looks unblemished. Extol when fashion’s mission accomplished.

Dior Spring 2023 Ready-to-wear

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We continue to speculate Claire Fontaine’s 2020 participation a meta critique? Is Chiuri, in fact, a motif of female disempowerment? What does her signature lace bustier do for the Woman of Couture? And now here, the patrimony of Dior abandoned to the toile de Jouy, broderie anglaise and raffia so much associated to the Etsy seller of cottagecore.