PARIS — On a rainy morning here, the day after Greta Thunberg issued her end-of-days clarion call at the United Nations, another young woman made an environmental statement of her own that was impossible to ignore.
It took place on the windswept sidelines of the Hippodrome D’Auteuil, on a grassy knoll speckled with wildflowers, where two big aluminum pipes had been laid above ground, along a garbage bag-covered pair of runways. “Imagine … by hiding in caves and shelters deep underground, small, but illustrious groups have survived the Apocalypse — climate wars, heat waves, mass extinction,” read a text handed out at the entrance. Then the Marine Serre show began.
Billowing black moiré anoraks swallowed the head while oily jumpsuits were lit by blinking red hazard lights; leather motocross body suits were spliced with fragments of red scarves and cloudy party dresses patched together from the odds and ends of nighties and shawls and tablecloths. Shells and other found objects swung together on chains. Boxy ladies-who-lunch skirt suits had been made from carefully fringed black toweling, and all of it was marked by the tribal signage of the crescent moon that has become Ms. Serre’s equivalent of a logo. She must be the only designer working who has managed to make her “It” accessory a pair of tights (also, now she’s making underwear; the world may be ending, but business must go on).
Imagine the Road Warrior by way of Madame Grès, and you’ll get the idea. There were dogs and a pregnant woman on the runway; community, and a touch of grace. The clothes were 50 percent upcycled, detailed with hope. If this is what a wardrobe for the end of the world might look like, the woman who made it, paradoxically, represents the future.
It has taken fashion a while to come to the climate crisis table, both internally and aesthetically. Ms. Serre, 27, has been there since she won the LVMH Prize for young designers in 2017, but she is no longer alone. It is just that when designers think about climate change and what it might look like, they have a tendency to reduce it to one of two things: plants or disaster.
(Well, no one ever said it had to be complicated.)
Maria Grazia Chiuri of Dior, for example, who has made it a mission to find a female muse for every collection, this time settled on Catherine Dior, Christian Dior’s younger sister: said to be the “Miss” in Miss Dior, and the first woman to have a license to sell flowers commercially at Les Halles, Paris’s central market, according to the brand. Then Ms. Chiuri teamed up with Coloco, a creative collective that focuses on the environment and public projects, to create a forest of more than 150 trees inside a specially-built structure in another Hippodrome (this time, the Hippodrome de Longchamp). They stood there in their burlap nests, ready to be distributed to parks around the city and neighboring communities.
But first, through their leafy, dappled shade wove a flood of very pretty gardeners in woven raffia skirts, fecund with blooms, under crisp sky-blue shirting. Pen-and-ink patterns of wildflowers wove their way over raw linen suits, and botanical prints grew on airy silk dresses. There were little straw hats and woven espadrilles, striped shorts and smock coats, misty tie-dye and filigree embroidery.
It can seem facile to fall back on plant life to express your commitment to sustainability and it is, a bit. But there’s nothing facile about the clothes themselves. And before eyes are rolled, remember that in 2012, at Raf Simons’ debut for Dior couture the walls were papered with one million flowers — without much thought about what would happen to them later. And remember that since taking over at Dior, Ms. Chiuri has had a tendency to speckle her ready-to-wear collections with feminist message T-shirts, just to hammer her points home. This is progress, on both counts.
The same could not be said of Lanvin, however, where Bruno Sialelli set his sophomore collection among the greenery of the gardens outside the Quai Branly Museum (parks, parks, everywhere), and then declared in his show notes that it was because they “encourage daydreaming and contemplation, far from the tribulations of the outside world.”
The rain kind of ruined that idea, as did all the plastic ponchos (encased in little plastic bubbles) that were handed out for protection. As did the confusion of a collection that added many pointless flaps and straps to otherwise elegant tailoring, mixed an old newspaper comic strip (“Little Nemo in Slumberland,” from 1905) with pajama suiting (for men) and Fortuny pleats (for women), threw in some gingham and potholder weaves, an old Lanvin cartoon print that apparently depicted bathers but looked like an unexpected takeoff on a Kama Sutra plate, hairy sneakers and metallic “Pharoah Loafers” (don’t ask), and then culminated in lovely short Grecian gowns, glimmering with gold. Mr. Sialelli has talent — he can cut a terrific jacket — but he lacks discipline. Titled “Slumberland,” the result was as irrational as many dreams.
It lacked the serenity of Maison Margiela, where John Galliano was dealing with another kind of modern disaster (so said the show notes, and such has become his signature theme): “the chaotic noise of the social media debris” and the way it has “hacked” our memories and sense of history. In toggling between the now and the then, however, instead of his usual freneticism, he found a calm control.
Using the classic forms of British men’s wear, especially the military, hunting kind, he ballooned army green satin into capes and cut holes in trench coats and giant trouser legs-turned-strapless, corseted dresses, the skirts fluted out at the knee. Iridescent organza bustles printed with silk screens of berries were strapped behind utilitarian short suits with taffeta corset tops. It was all very fin-de-next-siècle — if we make it there.
Before the collapse, however, the party.
Or that is what Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent seemed to be thinking. (Telfar Clemens, too, at the end of a show that ripped out the seams between tourism and the T-shirt, cargo pants and Jamaican flag knits, the British rapper Lancey Foux came out and all the models — and some of the audience, including the playwright Jeremy O. Harris — began dancing.)
In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Vaccarello laid a field of 414 spotlights, which proceeded to rotate around like an army of alien Roombas and send beams of light shooting in various patterns into the stratosphere, like we were on some kind of outer galaxy post-plant planet. Instead of trees: Lasers! Beam me back in time, Scotty.
Through their lines stalked haute rock chicks in knee-high boots and micro shorts of many kinds (leather, pinstriped, beaded), under sharp-shouldered jackets atop peekaboo shirts. Gold devoré headwraps became gold devoré peasant blouses became gold embroidered peasant dresses became gold leopard disco glam. At the end, a series of glistening Smokings, sequined and beaded, finished it off. The look was Loulou de la Falaise in the 1970s, at her louchest.
There is little question we are teetering on the edge of the volcano, after all, so why not dance instead? And it is not quite as irresponsible a message as it might seem. All that electricity used in all those spotlights came from generators powered by biofuels, according to the brand.
Good to know! But it’s also true that sometimes a fabulous escape from the issues is enough.
