I’ve been told for years just how intense Paris Fashion Week is — how it’s nothing like New York, not even close, how it’s grander not because it’s trying to be but because of the architecture and the romance and the history, how all of the shows are farther apart from one another than in Manhattan so there’s more of a rush (and a bigger exhale when you make it) and how the clothes on the Paris runways can’t help but inspire.
Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Fall 2017 collection for Dior felt like her version of an exhale. Her take — denim tuxedos and a sumptuous, velour-like hooded suit in heavy midnight blue — seemed relaxed and at ease. It was as though she were creating clothes that she, too, might want to wear rather than what the house of Christian Dior suggests she should create. Chiuri’s Spring collection for Dior wasn’t her greatest hit. I was into it, but a lot of people felt she played it safe. I think she’s taking her time.
This round, the whole collection was blue — varying shades of it that connoted an air of calm, cool and collected. I was not, standing in the back, overheated from an early cab exit plus a power walk in fear of missing DIOR. Everyone warned me these Paris shows start on time, but this one didn’t, and I’m pretty sure the hold-up was Rihanna, the ultimate Big Chill, who made her entrance in a leather beanie. It was the same one the models wore on the runway, beat poet meets The Matrix but stripped of any other similar reference because of all that blue.
I, meanwhile, came in hot off a plane this Friday morning and went straight into the whirlwind; appointments followed by Dior — a show that, though it didn’t hit me until I arrived there — I had been waiting my whole career to see. I didn’t even consider that it could let me down (the whole “don’t meet your idols” thing) until after. It didn’t, and I let out a sigh of relief.
Photos via Vogue Runway.
