Draped evening gowns came out in full force during Paris Couture Week, but the true muscle of the city’s most impressive ateliers was flexed with the season’s precision tailoring.
At Jean Paul Gautlier, guest designer Julien Dossena played on the house founder’s love of clashing together masculine and feminine elements by linking the tails of cropped tuxedo jackets to the trains of metal mesh evening gowns. Dossena also spliced open the bust of a double breasted suit jacket in pinstripe, allowing a version of Gautlier’s signature cone bra to poke through.
Couture first-timer Thom Browne, best known for his suits in every shade of gray, pushed them to the extreme for his show inside the palatial Opera Garnier. Models dressed in bell-shaped coats and bell-shaped hats walked melancholically across the stage under a bell-shaped chandelier.
“The shapes were repetitive,” wrote WWD international editor Miles Socha, “which made you focus on the quirky details: the 3D starfish embellishments, and gold whale-tail embroideries poking out of pockets.”
Equally outlandish taloring was seen at Juana Martin, where the Spanish designer decorated the wings of an ivory evening jacket with line drawings of faces à la Jean Cocteau. WWD’s Lily Templeton noted in her review that, “underneath the embellishments, Martin’s technical skill shone in the cut.”
Linebacker-like proportions were also spotted at Schiaparelli, Balenciaga and Gaurav Gupta, who showed pantsuits with scooped, open-neck jackets and rounded hips, like the one in chartreuse green seen here.
Meanwhile, Maria Grazia Chiuiri and Virginie Viard took a more minimalist approach to tailoring for their Dior and Chanel collections, respectively. The former did so by softening the curves of Christian’s signature bar jacket while the latter sent out a parade of plain topcoats and military jackets in Coco’s favorite tweed.