At Balenciaga, the incredible dress that disappears

The Balenciaga couture show opened with a meditation and ended with a storm cloud destined to disappear. It's either a statement of faith in the future or a lot of hype. Maybe both.

In place of the usual final wedding dress, Demna, the brand's mononymous designer, proposed 47 yards (155 feet) of the type of black nylon normally used in ball gowns, wrapped around the head and body patterns like mist, without any seams. nor the fixings.

Thirty minutes before the show, the dress didn't exist, Demna said backstage. After the show, that wouldn't be the case either. When you're talking about sewing, where the hours of manual labor it takes to make a piece contribute to an often exorbitant price tag, and the result is meant to last forever, that's blasphemy of the highest order.

It's also the next step in Demna's quest to disrupt the hierarchy of values, what is valuable, what is elegant, what is worth keeping (why keep it) and challenge the status quo luxury.

Before the dress disappeared, for example, there was a white evening dress made from old plastic bags melted to create a sort of shiny gradient effect, and another made from gold foil, crumpled around the body . Before that, there were classic Balenciaga columns for the company's swans, assembled from strips of recycled sweatshirts and soccer jerseys. And before that, there were oversized concert T-shirts and sweatshirts that were actually hand-painted oils by artist Abdelhak Benallou, featuring images of Balenciaga Atelier members as a band heavy metal and lined like the denim jackets with thick Italian scuba satin to preserve their cocooning volumes.

Couture has always been about what's inside and invention, but this was taken to the extreme: in silhouette and theory.

No one really needs couture, to be honest, Demna said. For me, it’s an experience of clothing, of commissioning in the atelier, of handwork, of secret knowledge and I wanted to take that idea even further. Instead of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, think of it as 15 minutes of fashion.

It was based on the concept that dressing is essentially, as he puts it, a performance. And in the case of the ephemeral look, one that is awfully close to the Emperor's New Clothes. That doesn't make it any less entertaining or thought-provoking. Especially in the midst of collections where performances of all kinds have become a trend.

To act

It was there, at Iris van Herpen's, that the designer suspended her models amid enormous plaster-covered canvases that she then hung on the wall alongside additional artworks, transforming the figures into a living series of bas-reliefs in organza, silk and lace and redefining the whole concept of wearable art.

There, at Viktor&Rolf, where fashion harlequins Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren engaged in their usual game of performance art, this time revisiting their 1998 Atomic Bomb show and transforming the human body into a variety of geometric compositions using which seemed very fanciful. preschool building blocks. And that was the subtext of Giorgio Armani's 89 variations on velvet and pearls at Armani Priv.

Well, what else are you going to wear to the theater?

Perhaps one of the many 1950s-inspired sheaths at Schiaparelli, where Daniel Roseberry veered away from what he calls his meme-weaver approach (you remember the robot baby in his spring show, or the life-size animal heads from a previous collection?), as well as the crutch of his iconic golden body parts, in favor of a focus on form and suggestion. The shoulders were broad, the skirts narrow, the effect often magnetic.

The risk for me is that there is nothing here that is intended to break the Internet, Mr. Roseberry said. (In fact, he forbade his team members from looking at their phones when they designed the collection.) The reward was more intimate drama.

A pale pink silk corset dress offered a play on the famous Schiaparellis hat with stiletto heels from 1937 (it was a Salvador Dal collaboration), this time with a shoe encasing each breast, the heel as a warning tip about approaching too closely, except you couldn't really tell what it was before you approach it. Black tuxedo pants were topped with a white feathered shirt, like Odette and Odile in one outfit.

Get dressed

Yet no one has approached the subject of the role that clothes play in the performance of the self with as much intelligence as Nicolas Di Felice, the artistic director of Courrges, in his guest designer space at Jean Paul Gaultier.

Rather than offering his best parade of Gaultierisms (cone bras, shirts and tattooed sailor tops) like some of the guest stars who preceded him, he said in a preview that he had decided instead to focus on the issue more abstract from what he This thought made Gaultier special: by putting all kinds of bodies and individuals on his catwalks, the designer had offered a place and a way to be who you are, to show who you are and to reveal who you are.

In the case of Mr. Di Felices, he would be a very talented designer.

Based on a rectangle and a corset (itself one of Mr. Gaultier's signature garments; Madonna, anyone?), and with only hook-and-eye closures for fitting and decoration, he constructed a carefully calibrated fabric treatise on how we use clothing to reveal or disguise ourselves.

From the first glance, a head-engulfing coat, he slowly peeled back the layers, here removing a slice of fabric and replacing it with lace; there letting the shoulders fall, so that the torso of a slip dress wrapped around the waist to expose the inner boning; there undoing the hooks at a seam, to show a slice of skin. The metal clasps sparkled like diamonds under the lights, the final sleight of hand in a magic show in (yes) 15 minutes and about not only clothing, but inner life. Presto, change.