The expressionist tailoring of the Paris Fashion Week Jackets and pants become vehicles of emotion

When, during and after the lockdown, everyone believed that we would stay in suits forever, the idea of returning to the sartorial silhouette seemed as difficult as necessary. Tailoring, with all the culture surrounding it and from which it derives, seemed almost contrary to the times: its formality recalled a world of work from which we wanted to distance ourselves and its heteronormativity seemed obsolete. Yet, in the years since the two-year pandemic, tailoring has returned - its call to order, and its values of classicism have made it a creative frame of reference on which (in some cases literally) to embroider new ideas and also a foothold to cling to in a world where chaos seems to reign. Yesterday, in Paris, we noticed a new pattern: three cult brands, three collections, and three different interpretative concepts of the same sartorial discipline. Their shows were also back-to-back-the first The Row at noon, followed by Undercover and then Dries Van Noten. All three brands brought to the runway their idea of a tailoring that we might call expressionist, that is, in which the same elements of sartorial culture were read according to three subjective perspectives that distorted certain aspects of it to create reactions that were both aesthetic and emotional.

With these first two shows over, at three o'clock it was the turn of Dries Van Noten, who walked the runway at Le Dôme de Paris. Now, Van Noten is among the most revered masters of the Belgian school (but what Belgian or Antwerp-related designer isn't?) producing hits year after year. His shows don't shock because they don't want to shock, the technique is grand, the prints and colors unparalleled -and this year his imagination with avant-garde sympathies was applied to many classic tailoring within a collection whose concept was intimacy, the layering of strong and impalpable materials, the delicacy of gold embroidery that looked like precious repairs and mending on classic pieces. There were double-breasted jackets of rust-colored velvet, frayed lapels, and trouser cumbersomely heavy coats that lacked lapels, stiff suits whose jacket was worn over a top that looked like a turned-up lining with all their subtlety, their non-transparent comprehensibility, these clothes seemed beloved and familiar as if they had been recovered and worn after a long time without having lost any of their beauty. Every misplaced detail was artfully put there, fully visible only to the wearer. The idea was that of tailoring that, instead of protecting like armor or making itself a vehicle for edgy expressions and references, finds a strangely intimate relationship with the wearer - a feeling that was not revolutionary but flowed as freely as Lander Gyselinck's jazz that animated the venue.