The question of inspiration has always been a bit strange when it comes to fashion: designers offering backstage ‘mood board’ collages to turn even the genesis of their collections into content and connect it to a deeper meaning that is often ridiculously complicated or dripping banal. Hence Miranda Priestley’s famous ‘Florals?’ For spring? Groundbreaking” moment in “The Devil Wears Prada.”
It was a moment that came to mind at the beginning of the Paris couture shows, when guests entered the Dior tent of the Musée Rodin to see the walls covered with 32 mosaic murals of sprinters, surfers and footballers, reproductions of works by the American artist Faith Ringgold (who died in April at the age of 93). And again, at the beginning of the Thom Browne show, when two teams of men in white skirt suits picked up a long braided rope and began a theatrical tug-of-war, cheered on by a carriage whose head was wrapped in a gold laurel wreath.
Sport? During an Olympic summer in the city where the Games are taking place? Groundbreaking.
And yet the result, at least when it came to these two collections, was exactly that. Welcome to the age of athcouture.
It’s a way to approach fashion’s most hidden art: the made-to-order styles for the 0.001 percent; the fashion laboratory, where a few lucky designers can play to their heart’s content – and make it relevant.
For example, the very idea of athletics made Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri think about freedom: the freedom of the body that comes from sportswear (as opposed to sportswear), the freedom that cycling granted women in the late 19th century, the freedom that not focusing on the new look her could bring. And that, in turn, made her think about jersey, a material with industrial undertones that she had never used in couture.
This time she did it with silhouettes from ancient Greece, with the jersey peplum-style draped over the base of a gold mesh tank top, giving it the feel of competitive sculpture. A tank dress, seams picked out with athletic tape, was covered in intricate crystal embroidery. Tank bodysuits glittered with more crystals. Skirts were transformed into sarongs for greater freedom of movement and layered over trousers. The combination of the very chic and the very functional gave each piece a piquancy and a modernity that it highlighted.
Ms. Chiuri has played with sports references before, most notably in her first collection for Dior in 2016, which inexplicably featured fencing, and again in a pre-collection shown in Athens in 2021. She often has feminist undertones. But she has never done it as effectively as here. Even her medal references – gold, silver and bronze metallic jersey and lurex dresses wrapped around the body, like the memory of a sash – which could easily have come across as bland, instead had a seductive ease.
Like Ms. Chiuri, Mr. Browne, a collegiate swimmer himself and back in Paris for his second couture collection, has flirted with sports in his work before, most notably in his own 2021 Olympic collection, which envisioned a futuristic Games in 2132. Like them, he also seemed impossible to resist the lure of medals. Well, everyone wants to be a winner and to that end he also offered a final panorama of gold, silver and bronze – albeit in his hands in the form of inlaid jackets. But what happened before the stage was really interesting.
In particular, the way that sport got Mr Browne thinking about equality: the way that everyone starts with essentially the same basic equipment – the body – and develops from there individually. That led him to think about fashion’s great equalizer, raw muslin, the toile or starting material for every couture pattern, making him wonder: What if you could elevate muslin itself to compete with silk, satin and brocade? So he did.
He turned muslin into yarn, which he then crocheted into cardigans that resembled raffia cocoons, and from muslin into tweed, which he transformed into miniskirts that resembled bouclé. He combined enormous muslin coats from piles of coats, exaggerating the shoulders and hips. He even made muslin muslin that was stirred and puffed into a court dress with a gold-embroidered bodice, and attached a bouquet of cascading muslin flowers to the back of a wedding gown.
He then added in the Olympic references: a sheath painted with a trompe l’oeil bikini and another with trompe l’oeil briefs for the swimmers; a sheer shirt dress embroidered with lace figures of wrestlers, weightlifters and archers; an Edwardian dress with dozens of tiny buttons down the front, half covered with glistening blood-red muscles. Even the lace-up ankle boots were cantilevered over a platform sole, itself elevated by a bed of mini gold spikes, to create the curved silhouette of a runner’s foot on the starting blocks.
It turned out that Mr. Browne had gone to the 1976 Montreal Olympics at age 11 and seen Caitlyn Jenner (then Bruce) win gold in the decathlon and Greg Louganis dive and Nadia Comaneci get the first perfect 10 in gymnastics, and he had never done that before. forget.
“I really feel that sport brings people together,” Mr Browne said. Like couture itself, which Mr. Browne called “the Olympics of fashion,” it offers a moment of communal escapism even in the most fraught and anxious of times. Let the game begin.
