Velvet Ropes, Inclusion and Kanye West in Paris

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/style/paris-fashion-week-celine-balmain-comme-des-garcons.html

Version 0 of 1.

PARIS — The weekend began in the gilded salons of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a grand mid-19th-century building on the banks of the Seine where the foundation of the European Union was laid and where Friday night Diane von Furstenberg received the honor of the Chevalier de Legion d’Honneur from Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, in recognition of Ms. von Furstenberg’s services to women and to the refurbishment of the Statue of Liberty. Symbol of freedom, tolerance, welcome, you know.

It ended on the peeling stage of the Bouffes du Nord theater, as Kanye West and 120 gospel singers brought Mr. West’s Sunday Service to the 10th Arrondissement, and a whole lot of jaded fashion folk to their feet, shouting and clapping in unison. (Mr. West is also going to have a Yeezy presentation Monday evening.)

Almost no one at either event wore a face mask, but in between, the Paris half-marathon was canceled and visiting editors started making plans to go home early. This is where we are. Everyone teetering between solidarity and isolation. Not just because of viruses.

Hedi Slimane held his Celine show, as he always does, in a giant black box in the shadow of the Invalides, where Napoleon is buried: more than 100 iterations of pipe cleaner pants and lounge lizard jackets; ruffled silk blouses and bourgeois culottes; buttoned-up little day dresses and golden gypsy frocks, one after the other after the other in a relentless parade of fantasy 1970s glam rock-and-jolie-madame-toned conformity for men and women (the looks are unisex).

This is Mr. Slimane’s world. He has been building it with great calculation, one sartorial brick at a time, ever since he arrived at the house (first the dresses, then the culottes, then the jeans). Finally, he put it all together.

It is a world full of merch: bags, sunglasses, skinny silk scarves to fling around the neck, what retailers refer to as “items” (even the perfume got a show credit). It is steeped in attitude: bourgeois alienation and cosseted rebellion. It has its own ready-made strength and allure (literally ready-made: most of these clothes have been made before, decades ago). And it is as easy to identify and as restrictive as a size 0. All that velvet called to mind not just clothes, but the ropes that exist outside the clubs where Mr. Slimane’s citizens play.

There is no room in Mr. Slimane’s Celine for the older models and the models of different sizes that have begun to infiltrate other shows. These boys and girls — even the ones wearing clothes that are essentially ageless — have the gangly, bony limbs of sour-faced baby giraffes. Even then, the jeans were so tight, my seatmate leaned over and said, “These are making my testicles hurt.”

Mr. Slimane is committed to the Celine image and he has constructed it with a built-in “keep out” sign for those who don’t fit, in all meanings of that word. Sure, you can take it apart and wear a piece here, a piece there, but Groucho Marx aside, why pretend to be part of a club that won’t have you? Does anyone really need that?

Especially now, when things are listing toward tribalism and fashion in return has been, with growing purpose, emphasizing its own inclusiveness; its own awareness that as an industry it is better when borders are loose and other cultures represented; when all sorts of histories — cultural and social, painful and joyful — end up in the same stew and combine to make something genuinely new, and relevant. When freedom and individuality and welcome are enshrined as core values. For designers and customers alike.

As it happened the Celine show took place the same day as the César awards, the French Oscars, where a film about Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, who grew up the adopted black son of a white French couple, had been among the nominees for best documentary. “Wonder Boy” traces his search for his birth parents, and Mr. Rousteing’s journey from the outskirts of the establishment to its inner sanctum (on Monday, he had been seated next to Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, at a dinner at the Élysée Palace to celebrate fashion week).

He has been on a quest for belonging his whole life and it shapes his fashion — often in ways that are unwieldy and unflattering, but that also symbolize access to a previously closed world. He — we — may not have been able to enter it back in the day. But now everyone can play dress up with its codes!

Like out-of-my-way-buster shoulder pads, scarf-print miniskirts in a horse and chain motif, and Krystle Carrington blazers with giant diamanté buttons that turn the body into an upside down isosceles triangle. Like gleaming bronze and caramel silk suiting swagged across the hips, and big pleated pants, and dresses with their own built-in capes, à la 1980s t-Caesars Palace-superwoman.

Still what stood out among all the visual bluster were some gracefully molded draped leather breast plates — and Helena Christensen and Esther Cañadas, models of the 1990s, among a group of older women on the runway.

As Haider Ackermann said after a show of intensely rigorous serenity via tailoring (he’s a designer who can cut and drape a jacket so it seems as calming and caressing as a breeze), “It’s about standing straight, and a fight to be present.” In black, gray and white; neon yellow, apple green and deep sky blue; whatever, well, suits.

In case you didn’t get it, there were also lines from Dorothy Parker — one his of favorite writers, Mr. Ackermann said backstage as Timothée Chalamet hugged him and listed all the looks he wanted to “steal” — sewn into the belts and sleeves of some jackets: “If you do not like me so, to hell, my love, with you;” “I shall stay the way I am because I do not give a damn.” Don’t apologize for who you are, these clothes read: elevate it, in all its singular glory.

The designer-as-dictator is an old fashion-world way of thinking. There are more than enough of those around in politics as it is.

Instead, now there is the designer as welcoming host, like Joseph Altuzarra, who — in the most sophisticated and fully realized collection he has made in seasons — offered a peek into his own family history with soignée 1940s suiting, all portrait necklines and narrow skirts, waists caught by the thinnest of chains, inspired by treasures found in his grandmother’s trunk and grounded by feather-tufted bedroom slippers. Like Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski at Hermès, with her egoless clothes in sumptuous materials that whisper only to the person who wears them. (You have to strain so much to hear, sometimes you wish they would announce themselves just a wee bit louder.)

Instead, there is Junya Watanabe, excavating the bones and sinews of an idea in its myriad possibilities: This time Debbie Harry, an idol of his youth, in a raucous chorus of leather, tulle, men’s wear and false fronts, so volume at the hips came from strapped-on handbags, and what looked from one side to be fairly predictable turned out from the other to be harnessed on. One way or another.

And Kei Ninomiya at Noir, growing body topiaries out of massed blood-red feathers, tulle, fake fur and flamenco ruffles; looping thin gold filaments so they trembled like sensors around the body; hiding a few lovely black shirtdresses underneath (yes, he makes wearable clothes too); and building birds of paradise out of many shades of … faux Scottish beards? What? Why not? Materials, like people, contain multitudes.

Indeed, at Comme des Garçons the designer Rei Kawakubo gave each of her 20 looks a unique soundtrack — opera, bongos, classical — as if to underscore each one as an individual unto itself. There were flapper-esque lines finished in a giant doughnut; sleeves that dusted the knees and sleeves that didn’t exist; bumps and bulges erupting from all sort of places; lace and nylon and cage-like creations; peekaboo with a belly button.

There were head braces with mantilla-like veils suspended over the face, and stuffed constructions that looked like misshapen airplane pillows around the neck and waist. Sometimes the clothes looked like movable tents and seed pods; sometimes they looked like wedding dresses. What was going on? Ms. Kawakubo wouldn’t say. Duh. She never does.

Her clothes often make no sense as clothes. They follow no rules except their own. They are not meant to be worn to a club, or out to dinner. They are meant to make you examine your own assumptions. To force you to open your mind, and invite in possibilities you had never considered.

That’s the point: Decide for yourself. Hello, Liberty. Nice to see you. Sing it loud.