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Now, on to the main event…

On Sunday morning, I woke up to a text from a filmmaker friend in Los Angeles who
shared a recent essay from The New Yorker, “The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies.” The writer, Namwali Serpell, argued in the piece that most contemporary cinema—including many of the films that won Academy Awards last week—was “on the nose or heavy-handed, that it hammers away
at us or beats a dead horse.” Serpell didn’t quite bother to explain how this had happened, but she did observe that the literalist approach was pervading other parts of our culture. Fashion, she argued, “capitalizes on a long tail of generic looks” that are decontextualized and endlessly recycled. (“We all wear Doc Martens but no one is actually goth,” she wrote.)

Like many essays of this sort, Serpell harps too much on the past and the way things used to be, and offers
no solution for how to improve things in the future. (Typical academic.) I don’t disagree with her thesis, though. In fashion, everything these days is too on the nose. After all, designers don’t have to be as imaginative as they once did, in part because they don’t have to work for their references. They don’t have to go to the library to sift through old magazines, or try to remember the shot-by-shot details of a film they saw a decade ago. Instant access to everything has
changed the design process as much as it has so many other facets of life—often rendering it more facile. The debuts of Haider Ackermann and Sarah Burton at Tom Ford and Givenchy, respectively, were so well received this week partly because both designers have lived beyond what’s inside their iPhones.

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For fashion executives, this banality is a big problem; consumers aren’t spending as much money because
clothes are too expensive, sure, but also because they are boring. Phoebe Philo, whose final Collection B drop hits the sales floor in Paris tomorrow, has shown that women with means will spend if they feel they’re buying something transformative.

Brands today are also competing with brands of yesterday: It’s never been easier or more satisfying to shop vintage. Walk down Rue de Turenne in the Marais, for instance, and there are at least four or five secondhand
shops selling Alaïa, Hermès, Mugler, and Comme des Garçons. A little further north on Rue Paul-Dubois is Plaisir Palace, where you can buy all of the above, plus Chanel, Courrèges, and Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, mostly for under €1,000 a piece. And further northeast, there’s
The Archivist, which sells secondhand Supreme next to copies of i-D magazine from the 1990s.

The point: It’s not easy for a designer like Seán McGirr to remake McQueen for this era. McGirr is a young
36 (I would have guessed 32), and has been tasked with transforming what is arguably the most challenging house in fashion. Not only does he have to reckon with the ghost of Lee McQueen, a figure as revered as Azzedine Alaïa, but he must also sell clothes for a company that has mostly sold sneakers for the past decade or so.

McGirr’s latest show, held Saturday night at the Gallery of Mineralogy and Geology, was the best of the three collections he has
produced thus far. Styled by Sarah Richardson, a frequent Hedi Slimane collaborator, this proposal was far clearer and easier to understand than the previous two, if a little on the nose: The flared trousers and micro puffed sleeve jackets have plenty of hanger appeal and speak to the house’s tailoring history. Next season, McGirr must challenge himself to bring more humanity to the showpieces.

Humanity, in fashion, can have an elastic
definition. On Sunday, Alessandro Michele covered a room in Valentino red micro tiles to simulate a giant bathroom, sinks and all. Fortunately, the stalls were toilet-free, but the sentiment, I guess, was that there’s nothing more intimate (or unnecessary) than going to the bathroom in front of someone?

Anyway, it’s possible to argue that Michele is too much himself, and that his aesthetic is not leading the conversation as it was a decade ago at Gucci. However, I do like
the way he looks at the Valentino archives. Unlike McQueen, Valentino sells a lot of ready-to-wear, but Michele’s shoes and bags—which were extremely visible on the runway this season—are the commercial strength here. (The shoes are truly fabulous and the bags are pretty great, too, and make you totally forget about the Rockstud collection.) Accessories are the more profitable business, to be sure, but C.E.O. Jacopo Venturini and his team must ramp it up fast while
satisfying the existing ready-to-wear and couture customer.

Photo: Filippo Fior/Courtesy of Hermès

At Hermès, women love Nadège Vanhee’s vision, but you can’t always feel her presence at
retail. Every store director decides what gets sold in their box, and Vanhee’s straight-razor silhouette is perhaps too edgy for some. On the runway, though, it’s powerful, and the individual pieces—a quilted leather robe coat, slinky knit scarf blouses, and to-the-point ankle boots with spiky heels—are covetable because you absolutely cannot buy a vintage version. I’d love to see an Hermès store dedicated to her vision. Although, of course, that’s not a very Hermès approach.

It’s always a guessing game of where the young designers showing in Paris might land. (Running your own
label here feels even more precarious than in the U.S.) Ludovic de Saint Sernin is far more commercial than he wants to let on, and he has the discipline to do more. I’m a big fan of Antonin Tron of Atlein, which is sexy enough to be sold on Revolve, but elegant enough not to look like it. At his show on Sunday in the Palais de Tokyo, my favorite piece was a grey t-shirt with a rolled sleeve that twisted the rest of the garment to drape diagonally across the
body. It was such an easy piece. If G-III ever relaunched Donna Karan ready-to-wear—far crazier things have happened—Tron would be a great choice. But I could also see him at Alaïa or Jean Paul Gaultier.

Speaking of, all roads point to Duran Lantink being announced at Puig-owned J.P.G.
imminently. I don’t know whether Lantink will keep his own brand alive, but I hope he does. He’s onto something. Like many designers this season, he engaged in corporate cosplay, staging the show in the new offices of comms-events supergroup The Independents. (Lucien Pagès, who recently joined the conglomerate-in-the-making, does Lantink’s P.R.)

Photo: Courtesy of Duran Latink

Forget about the silicon chest dickies shown with trousers—a man’s draped over a woman and a woman’s
draped over a man—for the first and last looks. It was too troll-y for my taste. Instead, look at how he subverted classic clothes: molding a Barbour jacket into misshapen hourglass; mixing snakeskin, leopard, and camouflage in one look; jutting a pleated skirt off the body. (Pointy, Ozempic-era hip bones are the accessory of the season.) While I was writing this at a café, a runway model and her mother were sitting next to me, looking at a video of the show on Instagram. “But what are they
selling?” the model said. Therein lies the issue with the prank. There’s something polished about what Lantink is doing that translates beyond the runway, and perhaps the joke conceals that.

Demna likes to make jokes. (I might buy the “Luxury” zip-up hoodie he showed on Sunday night.) But he’s dead serious about clothes. Ten years into his tenure at Balenciaga, he decided to make “normal” clothes this collection’s core competency. In his paraphrased words, it’s
much easier to attach a couple of random sleeves to a shirt than it is to find the right place for the button on a single-breasted suit. Backstage after the show, in a black jacket rather than his customary t-shirt, he explained that the idea came from getting a custom, made-to-wear suit as a Halloween costume last October. (It reminded me of when he wore Loro Piana–style vacation clothes as a social experiment while on holiday a few years ago.) He seems to be obsessed with thwarting
expectations. (Very Gen X for an old Millennial.) I loved his “normal” clothes last night, but especially a bell-hem denim pencil skirt, worn with a popped collar denim jacket, and the swimsuit-like dresses. It all works whether or not you’re in on the joke.

It would, of course, be funny if this ended up being Demna’s final collection for Balenciaga. After a decade of making so-called abnormal clothes—ones that honored the house’s codes in ways the naked eye could not detect—he decided to
nail the one thing no one expects of him. With all the Gucci speculation, his name has bubbled up of late. But that feels silly. I hope that, if Demna were to leave Balenciaga, he would once again do his own thing. His way of dressing, and being, is perennial. Remember that the name Vetements, the line he founded that put him on the map, translates to “clothes.”

A Paris court has found Bernard Squarcini, the former head of the French spies, guilty of
“using public resources to benefit LVMH,” where he consulted for many years. You may remember that Bernard Arnault testified in the trial. [RFI]

In other
fashion-adjacent intelligence agency news, here’s a story about how Diana Vreeland’s son became a spy. [Town & Country]

Oliver Chen, the Cowen retail analyst, is obsessed with Haider Ackermann’s Tom Ford and thinks it’s going to be great for Zegna. [Inbox]

I’m very into the new Uniqlo U, which
hits stores on different days in different places, so I don’t want to tell you the wrong thing. [Instagram]

I always want to read Leandra’s take on the shows. [Cereal Aisle]

And finally… Correction: Nicholas Coleridge did not
run Condé Nast International, he was only in charge of Britain. (Jonathan Newhouse was his boss, remember?) These guys really don’t seem to like each other! We need more fun fake battles.

Until tomorrow,

Lauren 

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