Paris, Gao Dingzhou, a modernist decadent celebration in the digital age

Can haute couture fashion become part of modern life? This problem occurs every season, and every designer and brand on the high-duty schedule has its own answer to this question. Haute couture is both an anachronism - completely out of touch with today's era, and perhaps the only remaining pure land of the modern luxury industry - where fashion can still produce radical, soulful illusions. This tension has produced fascinating results. Starting from Dior's circus, just at the Haute Couture Week in Paris, many dreams come true, Chanel's joyful villas, and equally extreme but almost oppositely presented Valentino and Maison Margiela are undisputedly The winner of this season.

In short, the works we see are all joyful, indulgent, and sometimes escapist, full of all kinds of decadence. And it's not surprising: the era of terrible divisions like ours needs to break out and be happy, dancing wildly on the edge of the abyss. If the world we know is rotting, why not cover up the collapse with the gleaming elements and the phantom of the glare instead of gazing at the gloomy and bad luck?

Even luxury masters such as Giorgio Armani have had to try their own personal routes. Along with the art of decorative art, it presents a shimmering deep red and royal blue, conveyed by the dramatic vertical contours, such as the extreme elegance of the visual master Serge Lutens. Armani interprets a perfect proof of excessive strict control: giving up is both the future.

The show is festive, indulgent, and sometimes escapist, full of all kinds of decadence.

Giambattista Valli and Schiaparelli have some indulgence in their work, and they have taken a dramatic direction. Valli celebrates the five-star luxury opium (perfume) in Paris, where Mr. Saint Laurent collected a collection of exotic treasures in his studio at Avenue Marceau. The entire collection has a lot of lace, pleats and felt Hats, which is quite complicated, but in the end it blends into the image of a typical Valli girl. Instead, Bertand Guyon introduced a baroque psychedelic style to Schiaparelli, which caused color and book to burst. Although visually interesting, these efforts are not fully integrated. After all, both Valli and Schiap are still struggling between traditional fashion and modern pursuits.

How to make Haute Couture become a truly modern product, since joining Dior, has become the primary concern of Maria Grazia Chiuri. The key is narrative. With a new form of feminism that has cut the image of the brand's consistent majesty, Chiuri has created a series of coherent but slightly illusory but full of elegant pragmatism, perhaps with luck. People take them back into their closets. This season, the feminist narrative is mainly a scene scheduling: the performance of the London Mimbre Circus set off the tone, and the costumes still play as usual, with only sporadic clowns and some clumsy bloomers to add interest. We don't have to worry about whether to sell it, but we have to say that this is a very hard series.

The growing Clare Waight Keller in Givenchy is a pioneer of modernity. This is her third haute couture collection for the brand, and of course her most confident collection: a combination of precision design and cool sexy feats. Waight Keller is a genre of unpopular designers, but under the refreshing appearance there is some kind of surge. There are some weird things in the series: she likes latex, which is an unlikely material for clothing. But this is not just the contrast of modernity. Waight Keller's vision for haute couture is progressive as she combines the quality of Haute Couture Services with a strong design statement. This is a strong declaration for the most demanding customers.

Modernism with clean lines and lack of decoration has never been the style of Chanel directed by Karl Lagerfeld. Lagerfeld has created a prestigious image for this stately fashion brand, composed of light craftsmanship and a lot of joyful atmosphere. These are the elements that loyal customers love, and regardless of their age, this is something to be happy about.

This is a successful show, and the flaming soundtrack is a icing on the cake.

Interestingly, Valentino's Pierpaolo Piccioli seems to be completely uninterested in the modernity of sanding fashion. “I like classical fashion, they are things that make you move and make you dream,” he said in the background before the star-rated fashion show. This fashion show is full of emotions, showing a very classic, old-fashioned but ultra-light dress, painted mainly by a group of eye-catching black models. Black people are dressed in high fashion, and on a broader level of high fashion about non-standard beauty – exactly what Piccioli is pursuing. In essence, this is a performance technique, but the designer claims that this choice occurred in the early stages of the creative process. This is a successful show, and the flaming soundtrack is a icing on the cake.

That is to say, aside from all the visual poetry and incredible colors, leaving the model lineup and the curtain call on Instagram, the rest is a series of quite traditional dresses that convey a Baroque a feminine temperament, sometimes even boring. In this comparison, there are both Piccioli's weaknesses and advantages: he made great clothes and liked to convey strong messages, but somehow, the two don't always match very well. What is left to us is a fascinating beauty, the visual effect is what we should taste, not the deep meaning of philosophy.

Not many creators today can find true poetry in tailoring. An exception is John Galliano, who still leads Maison Margiela on the road to victory, but he is two completely different from Piccioli. Galliano is a natural storyteller and certainly the most prolific and inspiring storyteller today. He narrates through cuts, profiles and fabrics, and then fashion shows. Throughout the process, the collection was held together in a compelling and outstanding form of creativity and produced an extraordinary response. This season, Galliano launched a truly inclusive fashion: moving smoothly between the sexes – simply a fashion show called men and women is like killing the magic of the series.

By reflecting on the visual saturation and eventual decline caused by digital culture, Galliano follows a reverse path in the form of a twist, a cut and a deformation, which stems from the outbreak of excessiveism and eventually towards temperance. Severe thoughts and some more compelling images: When we reviewed the conference with photos, the graffiti on the mirrored ceiling of the show became part of the brocade - making it impossible to distinguish between the background and the protagonist.

This is the basic trick of modern haute couture: in order to resonate, it needs to be something that is worth sharing on social platforms, as Victor & Rolf's slogan embroidered on his tulle dress clearly shows that It doesn't matter what you wash. But there is no doubt that fashion can be modern, even as a wonderful entertainment.