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Les petites mains can finally rest
Gazar poufs and mille feuille collars are now for others to enjoy Bernadette Morra - January 25th 2007. PARIS – Something is terribly wrong. It is late Tuesday afternoon, and I am at the Palais de Tokyo, waiting for the Christian Lacroix spring 2007 couture show to begin. I've been to the European ready-to-wear shows often, but it's my first time at the couture – ground zero of chic – where the most expensive clothes in the world, and some of the women who wear them, come together for three days of exquisite excess. Even though I am a couture virgin, I know that the suddenly slumped-over woman beside me means something is amiss. "Madame," I gently tap her arm, clad in a simple ribbed cotton cardigan. "Are you all right?" "Oh," she pulls herself off me dreamily. "Je suis désolée. I did not sleep at all last night as I was working on the collection." "You are one of les petites mains?" I marvel, realizing I am seated beside one of the legendary "little hands" who handcraft the couture.
She nods weakly.
Moments later the first outfit emerges and I gasp at a brocade mini-dress worn by Vancouver native Coco Rocha. The dress looks dipped in 24-kt gold. I turn stunned to the exhausted woman beside me, and she smiles in gratitude.
Later, after Lacroix has taken his bow, in a shower of the pink carnations left on each chair for admirers to throw, I thank her.
"Now I will sleep for two days," she sighs, collecting her nondescript parka and a plastic shopping bag that I am guessing contains a toothbrush, perhaps a change of clothes.
The mirrored bolero, gazar poufs and mille feuille collars that took her and her colleagues hundreds of hours to create are now for others to enjoy.
One admirer, a Muscovite in chinchilla hat and cape, sat in front of me under the imposing dome of the Grand Palais at the Chanel show earlier in the day.
Although it was not yet noon, she was swigging from a silver flask. "Vodka?" a colleague inquired playfully. "Cognac," the couture client responded, miming a shiver. Even though she is indoors, swathed in chinchilla and from Moscow, she is apparently chilled.
Elsewhere Victoria Beckham, Rachel McAdams, Sofia Coppola, Kate Bosworth and Rinko Kikuchi are heating up the front row.
The Chanel collection itself is perfect for modern-day Czarinas and Oscar hopefuls with feathered fingerless gloves, a Lagerfeld signature, and a nod to two of his greatest ready-to-wear hits of the '90s – tweed jackets over shiny black tights and fringed "car wash" skirts in metal sequins.
"It's the top of the top," Vogue's André Leon Talley declares in a post-show scrum. "You feel so uplifted when you come to a Chanel show ... exhilarated by the beauty."
And yes, darling, the jackets shown only with black tights can be ordered with skirts.
Talley is holding court on a ballroom-sized white carpet rolled out for the models to wander, white being a trend for the season both in the clothes and the environments they are shown in.
The Valentino show felt like it was held inside a hollowed out eggshell. An intimate room at l'ecole des Beaux Arts was made even more so with a snowy white carpet and sheer white curtain dividers, so that you felt like the parade was just for you and the 40 others in your little enclave. There were starbursts of pleats, pleats pleated into even more pleats, and a satin suit cutout like a paper snowflake.
At Givenchy the youngest couturier in Paris, Riccardo Tisci, bucked the white trend by creating a bleak underwater cavern with water dripping onto a cement floor. As the show progressed, puddles formed, and were smeared by the trains of the models' evening gowns.
Tisci hails from Taranto, a seaport in Italy's Puglia region, and the clothes were a seafaring fantasy Walt Disney himself couldn't fathom.
Silicone coral forms and broken shells were imbedded in pleated tulle. Sailor caps and admiral jackets had cartoon proportions.
And the murky sepia and black palette gave you the feeling you had drifted to the bottom of the sea.
Yesterday afternoon, Jean Paul Gaultier thrilled with a collection that melded motifs from saints and sinners.
Acrylic halos, stained glass patterns, icon prints and stigmata tears mixed with bustiers, siren dresses and backless jackets, some even modelled by burlesque star Dita Von Teese.
The sexy sacred heart dress will be sure to get temperatures rising both inside and outside the Vatican walls.
Unbearable lightness of couture
"The difference between couture and ready-to-wear is not hard to discern once you get up close here at the spring 2007 couture shows.
The clothes are technically stupefying. Sleeves at Christian Lacroix seem helium-filled. A skirt at Givenchy resembles a pleated paper lantern.
But it is transparency that is the common thread. The white tulle in Valentino's dresses is so fine you can see through it even when it is ruched. Lacroix offers a jacket that is a honeycomb of lace and tulle. Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci insets sheer teardrops into the pelvis of a contoured black silk jersey gown. And at Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld plays peek-a-boo with spaghetti strands of satin and tulle blindfolds dotted with black sequins over the models' eyes."
- Bernadette Morra
The World of Fashion in 2006: A collision of class and mass
It was the year that fashion threw open its exclusive doors and invited the masses past the velvet ropes into their misunderstood world. From The Devil Wears Prada to Project Runway to Ugly Betty, the public's appetite and fascination was ferocious for shows – both reality-based and fictionalized – about the Machiavellian world of the fashion industry.
But as class and mass collided at the style junction, there were casualties, calamities, catastrophes and career mishaps.
If you can't beat them join them
Talent is not enough
Dying to be thin
Model behaviour
The trends that mattered
Fashion movie of the year
The future of fashion magazines
The most expensive LBD
Underwear is still required
All in the Family
Gone to the dark side
"Blondes have more fun."
Or so the old Clairol ads used to proclaim.
They also mused, "If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde."
But the current blondtourage of celeb stick figures must be calculating that you only live twice, judging by their defection to the dark side.
There could be a lot of reasons they are going back to their roots. The upkeep is major. Tending to their blondage takes monthly touchups to avoid the yellow-hair-with-black-roots look that even Debbie Harry doesn't do any more. Or it could be damage control, an attempt to effect the smart, brunette Tina Fey look to deflect the skank-ho pantiless image. Next, we'll be seeing a run on geeky black, horn-rimmed glasses.
According to The Shaw Report in Entertainment Weekly, Blondes Going Brunette is under the "In" column and Brunettes Going Blonde is so "Five Minutes Ago."
Everyone has an opinion. "Dark hair is like a giant light-up arrow pointing to what is wrong with you. Blonde hair – it all sort of blends in a haze of beige," said Lorelai (Lauren Graham) discussing celebrity dye jobs on Gilmore Girls.
"I love my dark hair," Cameron Diaz told People magazine. "I've had dark hair before and I changed my hair colour because, in my mind's eye, I feel like a brunette. It just seemed like a good time to make the change. It's funny, because my family and friends all feel the same way ... they prefer me as a brunette."
Howard Barr, Canadian creative consultant for John Frieda and owner of his eponymous Queen St. W. salon, worked doing hair in Los Angeles for 11 years.
"Cameron was always a natural blonde," Barr says. "I worked with her when she did department store catalogues."
So why are these celebs going dark? "It's new and different and gives them a completely different look that is more natural," says Paul Cucinello, master colourist at the Christopher Stanley Salon in New York. "They also want to distract people from what's going on in their lives and give the press something else to talk about.
"People take brunettes more seriously than blondes and there's a `good girl' thing associated with brunettes – most of these girls have been pretty naughty, right?"
Does that mean Angelina Jolie and Catherine Zeta-Jones are the new gold standard?
"They represent this sexiness that isn't about cosmetics – it's more natural, so I would say yes," says Cucinello. "Angelina Jolie is the new gold standard. Everyone thinks she's hot.
"Right now, the hot thing is to look exotic, not artificial. There is an ethnic twist because the all-American blonde, blue-eyed look is not an adequate representation (of the population)."
"It's the whole Hollywood machinery and for awhile there, it was the whole blonde thing and I found it difficult telling them apart," says Barr. "Now there is a whole slew of them because the marketing has changed. It's the ethnic thing: Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek stood out in a field of mostly blondes."
So are blondes washed up?
"Right now blonde is officially out of style," Cucinello opines. "But no worries – as soon as they all go brown, they all start going back to blonde one by one. They like the attention."
"Blondes are not washed up," insists Barr. "It's like saying Scandinavians are out."
Formerly blonde Tracy Sheridan, an aesthetician at Lid Inc. on Yorkville Ave., has embraced her dark side for two weeks. "For me, it was the maintenance," Sheridan says. "I've always said, `I was born blonde, I'll die blonde.' But it's more flattering – dark hair, light skin, light eyes. It makes my eyes pop."
Do blondes have more fun?
"To tell you the honest truth, I've been getting more attention, more looks. I get, `I never noticed your eyes are so blue.' I feel like I have more style, more sophistication.
"Who knows," says Sheridan. "Maybe I'll go back to highlighting. In the salon, everyone (on staff) is going darker. In our business, you have to change; you have to be cutting edge."
But don't look for Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson, Pamela Anderson or Anna Nicole Smith to be dipping into the dye bottle anytime soon. The blonde bimbo thing works for them.
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