In Paris, Designers Look for a Stranger Kind of Beauty
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Is it possible that after all this time, beauty standards have only gotten more standardized?
After the Rick Owens show yesterday, the designer mused in a video interview for SSENSE that his collection was about “celebrating exoticism.” He said, “When I promote exoticism, I am saying, We have other options. The world has such narrow aesthetic parameters.” His ridiculous shoulders—here, peaked like cartoon mountains that suggest anyone who dwells here is villainous—are “a protest to the way the world thinks everything should be. It’s just a little nudge in the direction of thinking about otherness and thinking about opening your mind to other possibilities.”
That has always been the Owens way, but yesterday’s show was more of a gauntlet-thrower, primarily because of the plethora of gowns. The red carpet is where the world’s most conservative, or maybe just most widely accepted, standards of beauty are honed. I kept thinking (perhaps because I saw in the front row Law Roach, who has dressed Zendaya in some excellent Owens pieces) that this was Owens’s challenge to people with the massive reach of celebrity to evolve things beyond the snoozy strapless mermaid dress overfussy camp dialectic.
There are so many other ways of being beautiful: like Owens’s primordial gowns that looked like long pieces of paper or muslin, crumpled around the body with the remainder left free to fly as trains, or the enormous tulle dresses in pink and salmon and black with tucks in the back that made them radiate off the models shoulderblades like a jellyfish with a mullet. (Owens himself said several of the looks were intended to “turn the wearer into a 700-million-year-old jellyfish.”) Even his pinks were sickly but pretty.
This assertion that there is something to beauty beyond obvious charm and the annoyingly unchallenged definition of glamour was excellent. Ironically, it made me wonder if we have made the conversation about expanding beauty standards so narrow that they focus almost exclusively on bodies—and even within that, a certain kind of plus size, or nonwhite, or gender-fluid body. It’s exhausting and too conservative.
New standards of beauty are popping up all over Paris. Maybe that’s because a city that adores ideas and treats beauty like a religion; it certainly seems to have brought something out in designers Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, whose line The Row has in the past felt too straightforward when you wanted the clothes imbued with their strange taste. This collection was filled with small whimsies like a second pair of jacket sleeves knotted over the front of a shawl-collar lapel, and translucent trousers that were so tender they felt entirely sincere, even though they would have come off as gimmicks in the hands of less-skilled designers.
It was playful and intimate; even the wilder looks, like a white puffy Japanese robe, looked like the apotheosis of a woman whose brilliant mind has connected with a ka-ching wardrobe. You can see the mind of this heroine working and darting all over the place to make sure her life is as interesting as her very high expectations hope it is, marching with eyebrows arched and lips pursed into a cocktail party in her structured black strapless cocktail dress and little white gloves.
Even the choice to put beautiful tailored clothes with a little (rubber?) flip flop—it shows the Olsens’ confidence in their own distinctive weirdness. I wanted to wear all the clothes just as much as I wanted to cheer them on for creating this wonderful persona.
The little details are often what create new kinds of beauty: scents, styling notes, and beads and embroideries. At Courreges, Nicolas di Felice seemed to approach a classic idea of glamour and then slink away from it naughtily, with women in spiky cream dresses or carrying their slingbacks and going barefoot. The weird Paris rocker chick of it was fresh, like a wardrobe for the woman who has inhaled every Virginie Despantes book.
And at Uma Wang, unpresuming cottons and nylons were dyed with coffee and draped and tailored gently over the body, several under enormous straw collars. The designer was inspired by a recent visit to North Africa, combined with Ming Dynasty details.
What I love about these new ideas about beauty is that none of the designers are challenging women. It all feels so gracious, like an invitation. It’s fun to have a designer dare us once in a while—Owens is really good at that, for example—but right now the idea of opening your mind, of focusing on how you can enlarge yourself and your perceptions, feels on the money. This new sense of playfulness—a distinctly feminine humor and curiosity—is coalescing outside fashion with food artists like Laila Gohar and Paris Starn, and writers like Ling Ma and Patricia Lockwood. (Designers Simone Rocha and Molly Goddard are significant practitioners here, too.)
You can see how something more serious and absolute feels now by taking a look at Saint Laurent, where Anthony Vaccarello—whom I thought had one of last season’s best shows—loaded his output with too many sheer hooded cocktail dresses and powerful coats. I adore the instinct of his message, but the execution underserved his statement. His models are too thin, and his heels too high. The shoulders of the coats he designs are so strong and genius, and they, along with the silhouettes of the dresses, demand a woman striding, even charging, confidently. But the shoes don’t allow women to do that, and the way the clothes cling to the models’ bodies suggest that those in positions of power in French fashion need to have a serious talk about whether they are supporting their models with these demanding standards of thinness. And the sheerness of the garments felt obvious where a Saint Laurent woman might feel elusive and dangerous.
Maria Grazia Chiuri of Dior is always on a path to a sort of beauty that’s just left of center. That’s an increasingly intriguing quest at Dior, which basically created the hourglass couture French fantasy in fashion, and her insistently grounded styling is sometimes too heavy. But this show was light and expressive, inspired by Catherine de Medici with several crinoline-like skirts and unstructured panniers layered over silky shirts. It was sexy, in a way that asserted that this very young woman is in control. (Indeed, we rarely see a sexy look on the runway that feels like the sexiness came purely from the heart and mind of the woman intended to wear it.) And Chiuri really is the queen of embroidery. Looking at those eye-watering textures at the end is like having the best dessert in the world.
A tailoring revolution is underfoot in womenswear; some of the best brands are focused on trousers, jackets, and shirting. You wouldn’t think to lump Dries Van Noten in that group, but his zesty show earlier this week might make you change your mind. If you map the aesthetic shifts at Dries over the past few years, you see, roughly, a sweeter, almost bohemian silhouette with ruffles and princess sleeves. Then, around the start of the pandemic, you start to get a dark, decadent influence of 1950s couture, which came through most clearly last season.
This season, Van Noten is back to the light, with springy, bright, incredibly alive prints and textures. But while there are some of those oversized trousers and ruffles of the past, the standouts were crisper pieces, like long and almost lean shirting, dresses, and snappy little skirts. It’s the influence of that warped fashion history pulled from daring midcentury style—just take a look at the evil and awesome Charles James-inspired outerwear and cow-print puffers coming into stores now—that I think has made his collections sing.
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