Fashion’s new black prince reigns over Paris shows

Fashion’s designer of the
moment Virgil Abloh channelled James Dean and
the graffiti legend Dondi White at his Off-White Paris show Wednesday.

The American creator’s hype machine has pretty much hijacked the first
three days of Paris men’s fashion week, with Kanye West’s former sidekick
and muse about to

Thursday.

But first Abloh rolled out his own Off-White label’s spring summer
collection, which he said was inspired by “those crazy summer New York City
nights when it’s just as sticky hot at midnight as it was at noon”.

With temperatures in Paris every bit as high, Abloh sent out a run of
almost nostalgic youth culture looks, with references to the classic film
“Rebel Without a Cause” and white T-shirts with tags in homage to the late
New York artist White.

True to his streetwear roots, his tees were long and baggy and often
cut to the elbow and beyond. His love of branding even extended to the
shoelaces, which had “shoelaces” written on them just in case their might
be a doubt.

Several models sported neck and trouser chains made
from climbing hooks, with recut and embroidered jeans apeing a DIY teenage
bedroom vibe, which included leaving the security tags on shoes.

Doubters

While Abloh is drooled over by young fans who flock
to his shows, some in the front rows whisper that the new darling of the
French luxury conglomerate LVMH — which owns Vuitton — is “not a real
designer” .

Instead the
creator — who trained as an engineer and architect — cut his teeth with
on Photoshop. He has also
accumulated an enviable address book of celebrity friends and 2.3 million
Instagram followers.

He did, however, learn a thing or two about
the trade from his mother, an immigrant seamstress from Ghana who made a
new life in Illinois. And Abloh loves to add the odd couture touch, this
time with a pair of jeans with a kind of floral toile de Jouy pattern that
would not be out of place on the wall of a French chateau.

In fact,
the sometime DJ has a finger in many pies, with an art show running in
London alongside the Japanese pop art legend Takashi Murakami. And before
his Off-White show he told the French daily Le Figaro that he had much to
bring to Vuitton, the world’s biggest luxury brand. “I simply think that
Louis Vuitton is missing the products that me and my generation want to
buy,” he said.

Abloh, 38, is only the second black man to rise to
the top of a big Paris fashion house, with French designer Olivier
Rousteing responsible for both Balmain’s men and women’s lines.

Simons’ return

Raf Simons, the former Dior designer now at
Calvin Klein, is the latest to be tempted by the exodus from New York. He
had not presented his own label in the French capital for three seasons and
he showed Paris what it had been missing in a masterly late night show in a
suburban warehouse where he reimaging New Wave and New Romantic London of
the early 1980s.

“It feels good” to be back, he told reporters,
adding that his collection was “DIY meets the opposite” with a post-punk
aesthetic transported to the luxury heaven of couture.

He began
with vivid oversized silk overcoats with studded backs — “why should we
only have studs in leather?” he quipped — with some of his models wearing
leather mail shirts underneath, inspired by both the plastic rings of “six-
and eight- packs of beer and by Paco Rabanne”, Simons said.

The
theme continued with earrings made to look like drink can pull tops and
sleeveless punky T-shirts adorned with iron rings and diamante details.
Simons followed that by a run of outsized glittering polo necks, with a
couple of shrunken woollen jumpers for contrast, as well as silky neck
scarves which Duran Duran would have killed for in their pomp.

He
described the show as a series of flashbacks where he “gave everything a
very simple twist”.

The designer recreated a nightclub with
“naughty” mirrored dummies hanging from the ceiling or staring into mirrors
to evoke our modern “social media Narcissus”, he said.

With
supermodel Naomi Campbell backstage to congratulate him, Simons said
fashion “needs a new outline, something needs to shift”. Another talented
Belgian, Glenn Martens of Y/Project, played with classical silhouettes by
stretching a second skin of nylon over his jackets with ingenious
effect.

The long pleats he stitched into his trousers so they
flapped like cowboy chaps were equally neat.(AFP)

Photos: Off-White SS19, Catwalk Pictures

To watch the Off-White label’s spring summer
collection show >>