In the season when not one but two women designers get to step up to the helm of major French luxury houses, there’s a mini feminist revolution going on at the center of the Paris fashion establishment. Maria Grazia Chiuri is to debut at Christian Dior on Friday, while it fell to Bouchra Jarrar to show first, at Lanvin. She closed her own label to accept the creative directorship, and has done her research on the woman who founded the house, unearthing the fact that Jeanne Lanvin predated Coco Chanel and all the other female couturiers of the ’20s and ’30s. “She made menswear and sportswear before she did women’s,” Jarrar said in a preview. That’s the gem of a fact she’s clearly been turning over in her mind, because Jarrar is innately a tailor for women. Among appreciative followers, she’s known for her meticulous hand—a way of cutting and fitting pantsuits, biker jackets, shirts, and trenches that is incredibly Parisian, rigorous but sensual at the same time.
She has brought those signatures to Lanvin, and her new start was ambitiously staged in the gilded, chandeliered hall of the Hôtel de Ville because, as Jarrar put it, “It’s at the heart of Paris!” Her opener was a fluid silhouette of an oyster charmeuse pantsuit with a long djellaba-like striped chiffon shirt floating beneath it—perhaps the subtlest of nods to her own heritage as a girl with Moroccan heritage who grew up in the South of France. Jarrar-isms recognizable to aficionados came later—dense feathered collars implanted on biker jackets and gilets—but inevitably all eyes were on how far she would integrate or extend the work of Lanvin’s former creative director Alber Elbaz. He, after all, was the one who established Lanvin as a label with a dual reputation for draped dresses and madly intense embellishment.
Comments