Paris Fashion Week opens with IFM student show, Brigitte Macron and Pressiat

Paris Fashion Week opened Monday a with Masters student show at the Institute Français de la Mode, attended by Brigitte Macron, followed across town by a Pressiat Woke’n’Roll collection.
 
Remarkably, the IFM show drew Brigitte Macron, France’s First Lady, plus two cabinet ministers and a slew of fashion leaders to the second ever Masters show at this university.
 
Among the front row, Michael Burke, the powerful president of LVMH’s Fashion Group, Sophie Brocart, CEO of Patou and LVMH leading mentoring executive, designer Alexandre Mattiussi, along with his CEO Nicolas Santi Weil.
 
Though pride of place went to the First Lady, a teacher by profession and an energetic supporter of fashion – who has hosted three fashion dinners at the Elysée – with her husband Emmanuel Macron, currently serving his second five-year term in office.

Their presence underlining the drive by the French establishment to create a fashion school to truly rival Central Saint Martins or FIT, in the wake of its recent reorganization.
 
Presented inside IFM’s impressive college, 9,000 square-meters on the banks of the Seine, the show featured 27 graduates, from 13 nationalities. Each of the students in the Master of Arts in Fashion Design and Knitwear Design course was allowed between five and seven looks.

Three stood out immediately: the opening series by Qianhan Liu from China entitled ‘Lull – The Sleep Temple’, which featured some remarkable fabrics that looked like malleable wood or real leaves, cut into a dense leafy cocoon coats or pine like great coats with enormous burls for collars.

Next up was a beautiful series by Kira Sander from Germany, again highlighting unexpected fabrics, thick cable wool spun to look like giant spider webs or huge boulders. Entitled ‘Ilaria – The Language of Stones’, it starred uncannily plausible stone knitwear sweaters, skirts and boots.
 
One other young hopeful whose talent practically screamed “don’t be a fool and let someone else hire me” was Antonio Romano from Italy, who channeled medieval armor into some fantastic knitwear. Tunics, pages blouses, and ruffled skirts worn with cyber punk boots.  Every one of his looks were excellent.

The two-year degree program includes long-term creative collaborations with maisons such as Dior in Fashion Design and Alaïa in Knitwear Design, individual artistic direction guidance from designers like Olivier Theyskens, and seminars focusing on heritage, sustainability, or innovation with Balenciaga or Courrèges.
 
Situated in a space known as the Docks in the 13th arrondissement near Gare d’Austerlitz, IFM now boasts 1,300 students from 67 nationalities offering courses in design, crafts and management. 

Pressiat delivers with Woke’n’Roll

If Ron de Santis thinks Florida is where woke comes to die, it is alive and flourishing in Paris, especially at a rip-roaring Pressiat show this evening.

It was bucketing rain outside but steamy inside the battered rue de Richelieu office block used to stage the latest romp by Vincent Pressiat. The final look was a naked figure with a ginormous punk mohawk and a just-black-feather painted down center of her torso as a covering.
 
Fashion royalty of a different sort sat front – with Jean-Paul Gaultier joining young designer Charles de Vilmorin. Enjoying a brilliant set, Clement Dezelus built a winter scene of snowed-over car tires at the center of which was a beautiful hologram of a classic 1950’s American convertible.
 
At the start of the show, a lone violinist serenaded out the first model in the first of several hooded Mongolian wool coats. Pressiat cuts with glee, creating outfits for after, after-hours clubs. He loves statuesque jersey columns, and stunning lace front jeans made of Supima, the cashmere of cotton.
 
His girls are fit and flower in one-shoulder vamp satin cocktails. His men are buffed and not afraid to wear fur sarongs with matching booties, with nothing else. And if they have to wear a fur trapper hat, shades and a bumster skirt, the better to reveal all of their, err, bum. Well – then they will gladly.

All leading to a great climax with actress Julia Fox emoting in a laced-at-the-back screen goddess dress that looked made of liquid steel, wrapped in a shearling stole. A show which won Pressiat three-minutes of applause. And so, word up Ron, woke is alive and well in France.