Neymar and Mbappe satins are Paris fashion must-haves

Football’s biggest stars burst onto the Paris
fashion runway Thursday with Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Edinson Cavani popping
up on T-shirts and satin bomber jackets by Indian designer Manish Arora.

The flamboyant creator has linked up with their club, Paris Saint-Germain,
to produce a line of women’s clothes inspired by its stellar trio of strikers,
including vertiginous stiletto football boots in a mix of hot pink, lime green
and gold aertex.

In the most colourful and joyous catwalk show of the week so far, Arora
remade the team’s crest with the footballers’ faces surrounded by adoring
hearts in Indian Zardozi metal embroidery.

A kaleidoscopic portrait of PSG’s dishy Brazilian defender Thiago Silva
adorned another top, while Neymar’s featured on the shiny scarlet tongue of
Day-glo rainbow trainers.

“Life can always be more colourful,” he quipped as he also sent out
football-shaped gold chain bags decorated with the players’ faces and names,
and jackets with staggering leopard-head shoulder pads.

The traffic-stopping outfits came with leopard hand bags “complete with
laser eyes”, the ultimate WAG (Wives and girlfriends) swag.

“Girls just wanna have fun” — the show’s title — also made it onto those
football boot stilettos.

Then there was the model in a heart-covered wedding cake gown, her face
done up like a wacky Snapchat filter, not to mention the three-tiered cake
bags.

“The kitsch quota comes good enough to eat,” Arora joked, and it doesn’t
take a huge leap of the imagination to see them making it onto WAG credit card
bills.

The show went down a storm with critics, with the style bible Women’s Wear
Daily hailing Arora for “reaching out to a global audience” and nudging his
clothes “upmarket a notch, trimming away some of the excess without losing any
of its punch”.

It is not the first time that PSG has inspired Paris designers. Last year
the smart young French brand Koche send out a line of re-imagined silky PSG
tops.

The official link-up with Arora, however, is part of PSG’s strategy to
become a global entertainment industry brand, with a capsule collection drawn
from the show due to go into the shops in China and India in February.(AFP)