Saturdays are always special at Paris Fashion Week. Dubbed Super Saturday, it’s when a tribe in remarkable 3D-sculpted designs comes together and spills out over the pavements. Junya Watanabe jackets with geometric protrusions, Simone Rocha skirts in quilted floral silk, and Duran Lantink’s designs with bulbous padding on hips and breasts adorn these individualists. Outfits and accessories physically take up a lot of space. It’s the day when the Comme des Garçons collective of highly experimental designers, including Junya Watanabe and Noir by Kei Ninomiya, present – and a rebellious, avant-garde spirit really gets a grip on the style conscious.
Against a backdrop of 2D design (all streamlined silhouettes, harmonious colours and flat surfaces), this shape-morphing school of fashion stands out like a giant exclamation mark. The body, as Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons, has long explored, can be transformed into sculpture. And right now that fascination with kinetic movement, with blow-up shapes, with geometric as well as fluid organic lines, is driving a new chapter in style, as designers explore the joy of 3D to unexpected and often surreal effect.
How best to arrest the eye and body? It can happen with a side-bustle hipped skirt (Italian designer Niccolò Pasqualetti has made odd shapes a calling card); in a flurry of fringes (check Loewe’s silk velvet flares); in a billowing cascade of chiffons that fall into tendrils (via Sean McGirr’s trophy dresses for McQueen); the delicious billow of a marabou tunic (Bottega Veneta) or a giant flower-topped fabric mule (Dior).
This level of shape-shifting splendour used to be the preserve of haute couture, but now those handcraft techniques and the will to experiment is imploding the contours of ready-to-wear. Pieter Mulier, the outgoing creative director of Alaïa, had a field day. ‘I wanted clothes that cry,’ he declared of his taut cocoon dresses that stretch from the neck to the toe, and skirts that kick out into a waterfall of knitted fringes that move like feathers. The shapes are made to ebb and flow and place a focus on body in motion. One dress had a panel of hand-blown glass laced into the décolletage like an armoured breastplate. ‘They’re some of the most beautiful we’ve ever done,’ says Mulier.
Runway looks at ALAIA
The notion of clothes expressing themselves is a tantalising one. Paris-based Ukrainian designer Lilia Litkovska, who sells her collection at Dover Street Market and Selfridges, is a wizard pattern cutter, creating unexpected volumes and structural effects on her trademark tailoring. ‘What’s important is what is inside the volume – it’s like, without the need for words, the soul of the garment is revealed. These clothes I hope really “live” with you,’ says Litkovska.
Others excel in the expressive power of texture, such as the British designer Louise Trotter, creative head of Bottega Veneta. She embraced the scintillating with recycled fibreglass-lined ‘sweaters’ and party skirts in gradated ombré hues, while leather trench coats featured panels of the brand’s trademark Intrecciato plaited leather. ‘It has the feel of fur, and moves like glass,’ she says of the material.
Boxy trench coats with Intrecciato detailing at Bottega Veneta
‘How might craft be redefined today? How far can one push the expression of the handmade before its very traces of making disappear?’ These are the big questions running through the minds of Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, creative directors at Loewe. The pair are having fun with polished leather crafted into hourglass coats, multiple collars sprouting from shirts and chunky knitwear.
For Junya Watanabe, 3D is an adventure playground. He turned mundane household items – boxing gloves, wine glasses, shoes, straw hats – into extraordinary pile-ups. ‘By treating ready-made items – objects originally intended for specific purposes – as one of the materials, I recontextualised them and explored forms that could never be achieved through conventional methods,’ says Watanabe. And he continued that journey with paintings, old motocross gear and ski goggles fashioned into ball gowns for his just-revealed AW26 collection. That’s why they call it Super Saturday in Paris.