What war? Fragile femininity is the name of the game at the Paris Fashion Week, writes Sarah Binchy
The queue for the Philip Treacy show at Paris's Pink Paradise nightclub on Wednesday night, was long and desperate. An Italian boy, a model, dressed in a perfectly simple cream cashmere blanket, smiled beautifully when rejected and he refused to go away. A Spanish model agent arrived with two invitations and four extra people. "I know I shouldn't have brought my friends, but they are very small," she said pointing - and indeed, they were. Minutes later, they were whisked in. A large, pinstriped, American man with a crew "from BBC" bustled his way to the top of the queue and demanded entry.
How has top Irish milliner Treacy become so soon the toast of Paris Fashion Week? It's less than two years since he started showing on his own in Paris by special decree from the Chambre Syndicale, who had not admitted a milliner to the rank of couturier in 80 years. The party atmosphere inside the packed club - complete with lavish gin cocktails and edible flowers - might have something to do with it. His shows are known to be short and enjoyable.
"We're in for a treat," said the young man next to me, an assistant at Naomi Campbell's model agency. "Everyone wants to be here. Look, there's Isabella. [Isabella Blow, across the room, Treacy's mentor and muse, in her trademark pink Plexiglass satellite hat\] And hey, Valentino [who arrived to a cheer from the good-humoured crowd]."
Treacy's young nieces sat eagerly in front-row seats, with hats that spelled their names, Alice and Katie, in hovering letters over their heads. Treacy hats are such a statement you'd almost need an excuse to wear one, even to his own show. The brave dame who turned up with a miniature, furry, Union Jack fedora atop her head, looked sweetly ridiculous, like a misplaced, outsized tourist.
The show itself consisted of a series of Pop-Art jokes, from a Campbell's soup can perched on the head of Naomi Campbell, to a banana, to a patch of quivering grass with lurid, undulating flowers, to Marilyn Monroe's lips, to Naomi Campbell wearing a cutout of Naomi Campbell wearing a can of Campbell's soup. As hats, they stretched the definition of the word, being merely clever little items attached to the head at a jaunty angle by cunning, invisible means.
Pop icons of today featured too: Kate Moss and David Beckham. The most arresting item was an odd-one-out: Debra Shaw in a green sheath and a hat that entirely surrounded her head in the form of a swarm of butterflies: she looked like an elegant buddleia bush.
Although jokes are risky in the humourless world of fashion - and risky for the wearer too: how do you know the joke's not on you? - this is haute couture, and Treacy knows what he's doing. Like Galliano, he unapologetically fulfils Christian Lacroix's famous maxim, that haute couture should be "fun, foolish and almost unwearable".
The Galliano show at Dior was trademark spectacle, with acrobats, circus performers and bold, bright, outsize dresses that appeared to walk along the catwalk by themselves, so gigantic were they. Brocade, Chinese printed silk, taffeta and buoyant chiffon bounced along in a collection that Galliano termed "hardcore romance". Galliano thinks big, spares no expense, and manages to pull in the celebrity clients. The French newspaper, Le Figaro, was almost as impressed with the presence of Liz Hurley holding hands with her new fiance, Arun Neyla, as it was with that of Bernadette Chirac.
But the mood overall this season was a subdued one. French dressmakers' unions - "les petites mains", the fine workers of the industry, protested at layoffs outside the Dior show, and fears of war and recession dampened the excesses of many designers. Donatella Versace cancelled her catwalk show and held a special collection of only 10 evening gowns, displayed on dummies at her Paris boutique on Monday. It was a "more intimate" experience, she argued, for her clients. Certainly, and cheaper too.
Dior and Treacy aside, overwhelmingly, this year's themes were ethereal "romance" and flowing "feminity". "In times like these, the world needs sweeter things," said the quotable, if inconsistent Lacroix on Monday, in the nearest thing Fashion Week had to a political statement. Lacroix outdid himself, creating a sugary confection of colourful multi-layered outfits, loose, lean lines, and a surfeit of tulle and organza.
Over at Chanel, woman in 2003, as seen by Karl Lagerfeld, is a fragile creature who might evaporate any second, with hair twined and twisted with flowers, dressed in sweet swathes of fabrics in the palest palettes floating into nothingness. Colour - a riot of it - softness, and prettiness, dominated Ungaro, beloved of bright young things like Kylie Minogue and Sarah Jessica Parker.
French designer Dominique Sirop struck a tough note with the title of her show, Mad Max Girls, and a leather theme, but don't you believe it; the leather was softened by feminine fabrics: georgette, taffeta.
Jean Paul Gaultier's women were sea creatures in dreamy oceans of tulle with pearls for buttons. And the much-loved Valentino wouldn't know how to design an unwearable garment, from his creamy white skirt-suits to a ravishing red dress in the barest chiffon, cut high over the knees and descending in a train of fondant flowers.
The only couturier who struck a remotely 1980s, powersuit-note with sharp tailoring and mannish, three-piece suits was Julien MacDonald at Givenchy - and the rumour that's been going round all week is that he's soon to get the chop from Givenchy. Fragility, thy name is woman - that's the message that's coming from Paris this week.
It may offend your feminist sensibilities, but those textures will certainly feel good against the skin.