This season’s round-up of Paris Fashion Week street style confirms the answer to a question I posed two months ago: Is “trying” finally back in style?
Yes, yes, one thousand times yes.
The street style in Paris is serving up full lewks: a straw hat that reaches all the way up to Pluto, leather Bermuda shorts paired with a Cruella de Vil-esque coat, half (yes, half) of a trench coat belted over a tomato-red suit.
It’s a thrill to behold, because it’s clear how much fun people are having with their clothes. A great outfit, when you think about it, is not necessarily a couture ballgown or a Comme des Garçons sculpture, but rather a deliberate combination of patterns and colors and textures and tailoring that converges into something beautiful on a person’s body. That’s the thing about visible effort, artfully executed: When mixed together in a thoughtful way, even something extraordinarily simple can escape the realm of “just clothes” and enter the echelon of “wearable art.”
It’s also fertile ground for inspiration, challenging your eyes and brain to think constructively about how the moving painting you’re savoring was put together, and why it is making you do a double take. These extra mental steps have an inevitable Domino effect that knocks straight into your own wardrobe, tipping over the comfortable staleness of outfit combinations worn a million times over and rearranging them into the shape of new possibilities.
I can’t wait to get dressed.
Photos by Simon Chetrit; follow him on Instagram @simonzchetrit.
