'Quelle week!'

Each year, the recipient of the Jackie Moore fashion journalism award writes about couture for the Guardian. At this week's shows, how did the winner, Mary Woodward, cope?

Guardian story

Friday January 23, 2004

The Guardian

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The first Gallic style moment: I am in a Paris taxi with Jess [Cartner-Morley, the Guardian fashion editor], going past the floodlit Assemblˇe Nationale, tricolor streaming, and the Eiffel Tower appears in its nocturnal Lurex lighting. And I have a black invitation to the Yohji Yamamoto show in my hand.

This takes place in the gymnasium of the Lycˇe Carnot - indisputably the coldest place I have ever, ever been on a Sunday night. Woollen blankets and polystyrene cups of green tea make it seem like a gathering for some spartan Wabi-Sabi contemplation of fashion truth, except that an inner voice keeps telling me it is more like waiting for a very icy indoor football match.

Then the clothes themselves, the whirring of the camera lenses, like some cloud of arctic zone cicadas, the distant row of fashion big cats with Franca Sozzani, Suzy Menkes and Grace Coddington at its purring centre, see off the football metaphors. No, not a sport. It is fashion at its toughest.

But the serenity of the Yamamoto show is soon to be obliterated by Dior, way out in the Bois de Boulogne. My frontal lobes struggle with a migrainous collage of images of the celebrities at Dior ... Sarah Jessica Parker, Gwen Stefani, rows of French television stars. My lungs are coated with a clinging film of expensive contemporary perfume.

The Dior collection itself? Extravaganza is an appropriate word, gobsmacking another. Everything larger than life. The photographers - huge, clad to a man in thick matt black leather, unshaven, lawless and well nigh out of the control of the beautiful young ushers in dark suits - could have been frightening elsewhere late at night. Here, in the false mauve twilight, they are just actors in the myth in which everyone enjoys participating.

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Versace is hot on the vertiginous, bead-swagged heels of Dior. A quicker journey this time, a civilised few minutes' drive to the Ritz. I like the changing light on the curved Cinderella staircase; what is still left of my 14-year-old self admires the dresses, while the rest of me - 90% - wonders sensibly where you could find a good dry-cleaner to entrust one with.

Then there is the party in some night club buried in a shimmery section of the Champs Elysˇes. It is all very Catholic: thousands of candles, enough incense-type aroma for a high mass at Notre Dame and single men in black, looking like young defrocked priests.

I leave about 12.30am and, back at the hotel, I play around with my notes until I decide that Donatella's champagne has not sharpened up my prose. Most of my notes, too, were scrawled in the dark at the shows. Wild black ballpoint thoughts on Dior begin with "models are just bloody brave".

And they are. Even at the discreet and impeccably mannered Chanel show they must have to call on nerves of steel. It is lit with enough wattage to conduct brain surgery by, a merciless white radiance emphasising the curious purity of Chanel, a beguiling aesthetic that manages to combine ladylike perfection with a beautifully spoken insolence.

I try to forget the damp, acrylic, black ski-hat on my lap (St Albans market, £2.50, just the headgear for Chanel), which I dropped in a vast puddle when I clambered out of the taxi as I arrived. Touchingly, the security blokes on the pavement became quite worried about it - more evidence of the fabulous good manners of Chanel. Yes, if it is handsome spoilt priests at Versace, then Chanel is where very young runaway ex-nuns of good family should acquire their wardrobes, a world of skintight gloves and initialled lingerie, even if they are worn with jeans most of the time.

By now I am quite adept at summing up the audience, and even start to feel a little at home - until Jess says she wants a photograph of me for this piece. I have the same attitude to being photographed as my cat has to having his teeth cleaned: well, yeah, OK, but you will have to catch me first.

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Couture week seems to have a whirlpool structure. It started gently, but the final 24 hours rushed into a headlong swirl of four shows: Lacroix, Ungaro, Scherrer and Gaultier. All very different in clientele and atmosphere. At times, they were like food: Lacroix was relentlessly cutely gorgeous, like an M&S raspberry trifle with added meringue topping, and Ungaro's dresses had an odd early 70s Opal Fruits lusciousness, despite all the batwing sleeves.

Scherrer - no comment, except that the late start meant I had to run from that in the Champs Elysˇes to Saint Germain for the Valentino show and had a momentary sense of what this must be like if it is your job. Valentino was just Ascot floozie clothes: new money when they are supposed to be sexy.

But Gaultier was a fitting final firework; he obviously, like Galliano, sticks with the great Frank O'Hara's maxim that you simply have to go on your nerves. And it works.

Quelle week. I'd rather - much rather, actually - have done this than go to the next Olympics. And what about all the doom-mongering about couture? So nobody buys it? Nobody buys new poetry, but we certainly would not want Faber and Cape to close their contemporary poetry lists. Would we?

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