The Smarts at Saint Laurent

Two things are for sure: the Saint Laurent show of this past Spring/Summer season will have amassed a similar reaction to the collections that came before. Self-professed Yves girls will cry, as a sort of perennial prelude to their longing for the spectacular scent of new that the deceased designer once injected into fashion, while tired critics will have raised another brow, scrambling to make a point that differs from the several about evolution, fast fashion, vanity and sex that have insofar surrounded Hedi Slimane’s collection. Meanwhile innocent, unrelated third party onlookers will roll their eyes, frustrated again by the purported deconstruction of what once was The fashion house.

Paradoxically, though, the collection will hit stores come February and as with every other season, the very people who scoffed will quietly slip into the shop, rub their fingers against the fine leather, allow their eyes to feast on lamé that seems to have been derived from de facto gold threads, and declare their love. Just short of declaring this love, they will also either resolve to dream or resolve to forgo abundant cash in the name of looking cool. But this will be difficult, because everything will have sold out.

Again.

One week later, the following collection will be presented and the hamster wheel through which we run will resume.

I’d rather not admonish the use of denim shorts on a Saint Laurent runway this season. I don’t want to talk about how sure I was platforms were finished and yet, there they are. One can argue the multifarious reasons a fatigue print has no place in Paris, but what’s the point? Let’s just take the clothes — and this is an important point that runs counter to fashion — for what they are: the brainchild of a very smart visionary. If Slimane wasn’t smart, we never would have cared about boxy jackets and leather mini skirts with the same, fresh conviction we do now. We’d laugh at the vaguely sinister patent leather or leopard print pointed toe lace up boots of current street style marvel, and there is no way — absolutely no way — we’d be thinking about studded capri pants or Isadora Duncan-style neck scarves tenderly and judiciously.

It is consistently interesting to watch as our proclivities change with time — to understand and address that when fashion is presented to us, no matter how much we detest or conversely adore it, it could so suddenly be turned on it own head; how just like that, our emotions toward runway can flip with the switch of a new season presented in-store. This is precisely what separates the fashion, a larger conversation, from the clothes — a much more personal relationship. And when considering the dichotomy, there are traditionally two schools. From one emerge those who accept this disparity and from the other, those who can’t quite see it. Neither is particularly right or wrong in their viewpoint but in between them sits a bridge that has mastered a middle point and acknowledged both.

For spring, he likes top hats.

Images via Style.com