PARIS FASHION'S golden boy, Nicholas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga, kept his audience waiting for nearly two hours yesterday, but his winter collection more than justified the delay.
In an oblique reference to the house's couture heritage, he sent out an opening line-up of figured black cocktail dresses with severe geometric cuts on models with scraped back hair, chunky crystal chokers and silver stilettos.
He reinvented the sack coat, a shape that once defined the 1950s, in stiff black, brown and burgundy patent, its shine slicked with glittering silver jewellery. It all made for a tough new glamour in tune with the times.
Fabrics like vinyl and rubber were manipulated in ways that were new and fresh rather than conventionally outré. Digitally printed vinyl sheaths had a futuristic look, as did the brocaded rubber biker jackets decorated with oriental prints.
Everything had an interesting slant and a strong aesthetic. For daywear, grey wool suits with sloping shoulders and skinny trousers might have alluded to the Spanish matador silhouette so beloved of the house's august founder, but were brought sharply up to date with the sort of subtlety and modernity that defined the whole collection.
"Chaos Point" rightly described Vivienne Westwood's romp in the Hotel Westin's baroque ballroom, which featured models precariously balanced on six-foot stilts in pinstripe suits and elaborate ballgowns.
Thirty-six English schoolchildren were invited to collaborate on her show by handpainting her clothes and providing drawings for the models' faces. The result had the usual hallmarks of the designer's wild fashion fantasies and, allied with the children's paintings, a certain whacky, demented energy. "I wanted the general cut of the clothes to seem like childish cut-outs," she said.
Westwood is adored by the Japanese and they also turned out in force for two designers of their own yesterday: Issey Miyake and a newcomer called Tao, a protégé of Comme des Garcons.
Both explored fabrics and yarn engineering; at Miyake, paper dresses were pouched and bubbled, the famous pleats were shaped in new and striking ways and in a season dominated by grey, the show featured a grey silk origami-style wedding dress. Tao's intricate, tangled knits, ruched, frilled and flounced, gathered and swagged, gave her ragtag models a bedraggled, sombre air. There were lovely draped gold and black polka dot dresses and a lighter side showed in fine sparkle knits in turquoise and lilac embellished with ribbon embroidery motifs.