Paris Dispatch: Adopt the Energy at Saint Laurent

Saint Laurent shows are great for two reasons:

Contrary to the belief that fashion week can successfully occur from a computer screen, it really does take being there to understand the precision with which Hedi Slimane has built the vitality that defines his Saint Laurent.

And though the shows aren’t quite big — or perhaps this is because they’re not big — they are always packed enough to create the kind of bottleneck that keeps you inching toward a passageway for ten plus minutes, which on the penultimate eve of fashion month unfailingly provides interesting conversational fodder from the surrounding critics.

Last night, after a 60-look crash course in skinny, high waist pants, ripped tights, loud, large prom skirts and all the kind of skin (and bone) bearing short stuff that you’d expect from Saint Laurent, the exodus that emerged maintained only one lyric. It’s the same one that has been fine tuned, chanted and re-preached since Slimane took over almost three years ago: that could have been Forever 21.

But here’s the thing: does that matter? The largest criticism of New York Fashion Week was that nothing felt “new.” That feeling came out of London, Milan and even Paris in a few instances, but how many times are we going to have to talk about the concept of wheel reinvention before we finally get that a wheel is a wheel and was always a wheel and if it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it? What we seek isn’t newness so much as it is a thoughtful challenge to the narrative. And sure, yes, you can say that the de facto clothes at Saint Laurent (which, it is worth pointing out, do look like the shiniest version of the wheel we’re already familiar with), don’t challenge you — but then again, can you really?

There are two kinds of fashion shows: the ones that sell clothes and the ones that sell an idea — an energy. Every now and then, you will discover a designer who can do both (see: Nicolas Ghesquiére), but that is rare. Slimane falls from the latter camp and the energy that he sells has become palpable only because of the clothes. For every nose up at the ripped tights of Fall 2015, there will be ten purchases to eradicate it. And that is genius of Saint Laurent. Slimane is quite possibly the only designer who is actually selling such a crystallized, literal version of cool. If two years ago, you couldn’t fake it, in 2015, you can and that’s because of him.

We talk about the end of trends as if it’s actually true that forever henceforth, we will live like black crows among closet staples and clean lines. That, in itself, is a trend. But we won’t. On Sunday, Vanessa Friedman wrote in a stellar review for The New York Times, “Gimme a fad!”

Unflinching in his conviction to challenge, freeze and define this fad — so much so that you are tricked into believing the clothes, the show, the energy will never change — Slimane is doing just that.

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