So begins the year of fashion change. First out of the gate: Lanvin, where Peter Copping, who took the creative reins in September, wasn’t just tasked with giving an old name a reboot because, you know, consumers were bored and the bags just weren’t selling — he essentially had to resuscitate it.
For while Lanvin likes to identify itself as the oldest French couture house in continual existence, using the word “existence” in relationship to the brand over the past decade might have been stretching the matter. Since Alber Elbaz left in 2015, it has been more like a maison on life support after a series of designers whose names no one can really remember so scrambled its identity that it had drifted into near-total irrelevance. Mr. Copping’s job was to shock it back into action.
The stakes were high, not just for Lanvin, but for the designer himself, who had done brief stints as the creative director of Nina Ricci and Oscar de la Renta, where he had the unenviable job of taking over after Mr. de la Renta’s death in 2014, and was fired pretty quickly after a clash with management. He has spent the past few years behind-the-scenes at Balenciaga, first as head of couture and then running special projects and V.I.P. dressing. Lanvin was a chance, once again, to make his voice heard, and to demonstrate what happens when his signature affinity for a bit of French flou gets tempered by the challenge of Demna’s dark vision at Balenciaga.
Did he?
Well, although Mr. Copping’s first show was more like an EpiPen injection than defibrillator paddles, it still offered a carefully calibrated dose of adrenaline.
Which is to say it provided a convincing statement about what a certain kind of beguilingly twisted sophistication might look like at the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century. If the residents of the Bauhaus ended up on the board of a tech company and then threw themselves down on a Le Corbusier daybed for a gin fizz after a long day of debating the future and an evening of Champagne schmoozing, this is what they might wear. It’s not an accident that the geometric beige and black carpet that covered the floor of the show space had been recreated from a carpet found in — Jeanne Lanvin’s bathroom. There was a photo of the bathroom on Mr. Copping’s mood board backstage.
Eschewing the currently popular lure of big sets! And bigger celebrities! Mr. Copping instead focused on the clothes. That’s an idea that these social-media-driven days is increasingly out of (ahem) fashion, but that’s part of the pitch here. Free yourself from the viral.
Mr. Copping did, in a coed show that dipped into the weird, muddy color palette of the 1930s — bronze and navy and burgundy — and the long, louche lines of the ’20s, with dropped waists and pencil skirts and cocoon overcoats curving down to the upper ankle. Familiar shapes (the trench coat, the pea coat, the column gown) had been given the Brutalist treatment: peaked collars razor-sharp, but also swaddling; power shoulders rendered soft, but not retiring; the romance of a capelet studded in silver and tossed over a sheer T-shirt and black trousers, pleated at the waist. They spoke gently to the heritage of the house without getting mired in it.
The result had a no-nonsense power that seemed easy to shrug on, but didn’t pander to prettiness or the need for easy resolution. Though the men’s wear (Mr. Copping’s first) seemed more like a struggling supporting act than an equal partner in the reinvention, the evening looks were particularly good. Especially a pair of gold and black lace halters — one a dress, one effectively an apron worn tossed atop matching 24-karat pants — and a washed silk ivory T-shirt covered in a yoke of black paillettes and paired with slouchy black pants. If someone doesn’t wear them to at least one award show this season, the stylist community is not doing its job.
The fact the clothes were shown on models of all ages (and not erstwhile supermodels brought back for a performative headline-grabbing stunt, but simply older models who wore their experience elegantly) underscored the sense that these were garments for individuals. Ones with multilayered lives.
Not to mention proving that it is possible to learn from history rather than simply repeating it. That’s the real wake-up call.
