Couture Trend: Body-con Makes a Comeback
Body-con feels like shorthand for wrapping the body in short and tight looks. For the houses at Paris Couture Week, that was only the beginning of the story.
Owing to his previous experience working with the couturier’s labels, Glenn Martens married Jean Paul Gaultier favorites like corsetry, sailor stripes and Aran knits with Y/Project signatures for his one-off couture collection for the house.
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Most turned out as sexy, body-hugging columns with lively surface treatments: here, layers of optical tiger stripes; there, a mash-up of lace and ribbons trapped under tulle.
At Elie Saab, the trend took the shape of a minidress that played with the tension between embellished transparent panels and matte fabric wound around the body and flowing to the ground as a dramatic cape.
That said, designers during couture didn’t so much flaunt or transcribe the body’s curves as subtly highlight them, be it through cuts or using the skin as a feature of their designs.
Take Schiaparelli. While the body part moldings, a key ingredient of recent collections, were absent this season, Daniel Roseberry hewed close to the body’s curves in a different way by putting the accent on tailoring.
And even the relative distance of planetary rings — or a Baroque cage dress inspired by the rays of the sun, made of hand-molded leather covered in gold leaf and vintage cabochon stones — only served to magnify the body’s presence.
In other designers’ hands, the trend naturally shifted to the idea of underpinnings, with Alexis Mabille, Zuhair Murad and Ulyana Sergeenko making the corset visible but not quite constraining.
Alexandre Vauthier roared back to the runway with a collection that carried through some of the broad-shouldered, cinched suiting of his ready-to-wear collection, rendered this season in velvet, combined with plenty of sequins at play on gowns that showcased his signature glitz and glam.
High-necked minidresses with exaggerated puff sleeves had a harder edge and skin-tight dresses with hip cutouts made it clear he hasn’t lost his rock ‘n’ roll roots.
And while that definition usually swung toward the long and leggy variety, Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino found the challenge of designing for all bodies “interesting for me to study, and drape on a body that has different proportions,” he said at a preview.
It was an exercise requiring rigor, which came across as in austere lines and restrained embellishment he favored for spring. Speaking of Dutch model Jill Kortleve’s curves, he noted that “you have to see the fierceness of a different body.”
Launch Gallery: Spring 2022 Couture Trend: Bodycon
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