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Nov. 9 - Nov. 16, 2003 |
Paris catwalks alive with colour
Fashion industry currently experiencing boom as designs reflect optimistic mood
Originally Published: 2003-11-02
The curtain has come down on the Parisian parades, which also closed the long season of prêt-a-porter fashion shows that began in New York and London and culminated in Milan and Paris.
The official calendar went as far as last Monday, but the games were over, foreign journalists had left, buyers were touring showrooms purchasing what they had watched on the catwalks. According to them, the real gauge of fashion, this season "wasn't bad".
Designers, they claim, mostly relied on greater wearability in their collections, parading garments that looked ready to be sold; their fantasy was mostly used on light heartedness, light colours, and a great desire for optimism. The mood somehow seemed "post-war," with a lot of colour and a lot of realism.
Fashion houses got comforting data last month but remain wary. Valentino, for instance, enjoyed a 60 per cent increase in U.S. sales for September: a veritable boom. Matteo Marzotto explains: "2003 was a terrifying year: what with the war, the SARS epidemics, the dollar rate of exchange, the months of April, May, June, and July were very hard. The last quarter will be vital to this year's bottom line."
In this atmosphere of still-uncertain recovery, the fashion world decided to give its contribution to optimism. Paris built on nine days in Milan that had been full of chiffon, pastel colours, coloured shirtwaists and flower motifs.
The trend was confirmed: next summer will see a lot of pink and very little black (possibly mixed with flesh tones), a lot of red especially in orange and fuchsia shades, a lot of bright green, a lot of white, and every hue of blue from cobalt to turquoise. Lightweight fabrics (chiffon, voile, organza, cotton or silk gauze, tulle) return to their traditional roles, summer experiments with light fur and "refreshing" cashmere all but disappear: last summer's heat wave brought many back to their senses.
Accessories are still fundamental, including bijoux. Sandals were either flat-soled or high-heeled, with no in-between (heels tend to grow thick, too). Observers could admire a great deal of new handbags (some parades looked like little more than pretexts for presenting handbags), split between extremes: tiny ones (cellphone-plus-lipstick style) and large ones (cabin-luggage style).
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