By Jude Jones.
Managing editor Jude Jones reviews the highlights of Paris Menswear A/W Fashion Week, as another of the fashion world’s seminal events rolls to an end. These are our favourites from a remarkably imaginative, innovative outing.
Rick Owens
How do we create in times of human crisis? The realm of high fashion – cold, lofty, insular – feels so divorced from our layperson’s reality, yet in a moment when human isolation and desolation have been made to feel so unbearably ubiquitous, the ritual elitism that defines their world seems to pulsate back through ours: compassion reduced to commodity, intimacy to discrepancy.
Owens’ “PORTERVILLE” show is his heartfelt response to such contemporary existentialisms. Named for his California hometown on the borders of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, the show becomes a literal homecoming, replacing Owens’ usual stage at the Palais de Tokyo for the minimalist dystopianism of his own house. Located in the former headquarters of the Parti socialiste on the Place du Palais Bourbon, this is where, twenty-five years ago, Owens founded his brand, giving us intimate passage into his interior world. And this leitmotif of the intimate seeps naturally into his designs. Enormous, armour-like jackets made from alpaca, cashmere, and merino; sculptural puffer jackets enveloping, obscuring, and protecting his models’ otherworldly faces and bodies. These were the pieces that led just some of the charge.
Yet, adjoining this insistence on the intimate was an unsettling, distinct sense of the uncanny. ‘COLLECTION PROPORTIONS ARE GROTESQUE AND INHUMAN IN A HOWLING REACTION TO SOME OF THE MOST DISAPPOINTING HUMAN BEHAVIOUR WE WILL WITNESS IN OUR LIFETIME,’ read the pamphlet given out to Owens’ 100-odd, hand-selected attendees. So, Owens’ models were often disfigured by their looks as well as being sheltered by them: by London-based designer Straytukay’s alien-esque inflatable boots, by the cage-like contraptions dangled parasitically over flesh, by the heavy fetishist jackets from SM-scene veteran Matisse Di Maggio. Owens has curated an experience which strangely captures the essence of childhood and home, beautiful tenderness tempered by what he calls the ‘small brutalities’ of an otherwise untender world beyond.
Loewe
Something of the Loewe A/W 2024 menswear show reminds me of Paris’s iconic, technicolour Sainte-Chapelle, the former unfolding as an augmented-reality kaleidoscope described elsewhere as a “strange cathedral to masculinity”; the latter a literal cathedral of the vibrant otherworldly. Centred around the Los Angeles-based artist Richard Hawkins, whose chicly kitsch collage works treat themes of celebrity, sex, consumer capitalism, and the modern man, a cornucopia of Hawkin’s work crowned Loewe’s runway, inaugurating the multimedia dimension that Jonathan Anderson felt so integral to his show.
A show which exploded into technicoloured collage across several realms of reality. Anderson thus made himself not only fashion designer but architect for the show, transforming his otherwise austere, sterile showroom into a vibrant chapel, a living shrine to the modern celebrity. iPhone selfies of the designer’s more renowned devotees – from Josh O’Connor to Omar Apollo – were thus as stained-glass icons, pulsating with supernatural energy along the enclosing walls.
Central to this act of digital-era devotion was, of course, Anderson’s collection, which captured so smoothly both the ethos and praxis underlying Hawkins’s intellectual paint-worlds. So there was something playful yet bold to the arresting block colours styled with sockless, pastel sneakers, to the high waistlines, unlooped belts, and back-to-school bags. Each a tesserae piece in Anderson’s postmodern mosaic of masculinities, reflecting our contemporary world which, in Anderson’s words, has itself ‘become a collage,’ fractured yet strangely whole.
Dior
Behind Kim Jones’s Dior Homme show was a piece of family history: a photograph of Soviet-born ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev, who defected to the West during a 1961 trip to Paris in a move famously heralded as the ‘Dance to Freedom.’ The image, adorning the invite to the immense, sixty-look show, was taken by Jones’ uncle, himself a ballet dancer who would go on to document Nureyev’s transition to life on the Iron Curtain’s other side. A life which was not without melodrama, tragedy too. Nureyev, having successfully evaded KGB operatives until after the fall of the Berlin Wall, would later die to AIDS at the nadir of the crisis, but continued to perform to ravenous reviews into his illness’s most advanced stages. Photographs taken by Jones’s uncle along the way were compiled into a small, sentimental leaflet left on the seats of each attendee, providing critical reference for the behemothic runway.
In assembling the show, Jones was inspired not only by his own family history, but also that of his atelier. One of Christian Dior’s most famous muses had been the English ballerina Margot Fonteyn, who famously danced many times with Nureyev in acclaimed productions such as Romeo and Juliet and Swan Lake. Jones’s new take, titled “Nureyev,” is a masculine reimagining of these historic, impossibly-intwined intimacies, bringing ephemera from the dancer’s lifetime into the modern age.
So, the ballet house is reimagined within the chasm-like lungs of a purpose-built hangar on the École Militaire, through which boomed a reinterpretation, courtesy of Max Richter, of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Nights,” to which Nureyev and Fonteyn danced in their Shakesperian ballet. Meanwhile, Jones’s outfits perfectly blended past with present: a streetwear update to the classic ballet pump, turbans like those worn by Nureyev in the dance studio, or an intricate cape based on an antique silver uchikake kimono once owned by the performer, commissioned by Jones to traditional craftsmen in Japan. The show was a homage to the elegant androgyny of the modern man, a modernity foreshadowed bravely by men like Nureyev.
Our Other Highlights
Although these were our three top picks from Fashion Week, the rest of the spectacular was not without news. The ever-polymathic Pharrell Williams presented his sophomore show for Louis Vuitton, which reclaimed white-washed narratives of the “Wild West” in collaboration with the powwow dance troupe Native Voices of Resistance and Dee Jay Two Bears of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Grace Wales Bonner, Britain’s most prodigious daughter, masterfully fused American college preppiness with Parisian elegance in an homage to Washington DC’s Howard University, the historic Black institution whose alumni include Toni Morrison, Kamala Harris, and Chadwick Boseman. And Homme Plissé Issey Miyake, in its collaboration with the visionary French artist Ronan Bouroullec, turned Japanese felt-tip painting into architectural disconventionality, euphorically conjoining high-fashion and high-art in an ecstatic throe of colours and textures. Paris Men’s A/W Fashion Week 2024 offered a characteristically strong and imaginative package, uniting the political, the personal, and the transcendental into one eclectic yet cohesive embodied package.
Jude Jones (@jude_j0nes2002) is the managing editor of GAY45 and is an interdisciplinary student journalist, currently completing an undergraduate degree in History & French at the University of Cambridge. His writing – covering photography, nightlife, creative work, gallery reviews, interest pieces, and political comments – have also been published by Varsity, The Cambridge Language Collective, and DISRUPTION, among others. He is in his final year of studies and is hoping to move to Paris next year to pursue a postgraduate degree in History & Philosophy of Art.
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