There are certain things you come to always expect at an Ann Demeulemeester show: a flood of black stomping boots, brooding romanticism for lanky, melancholic characters who look like a cross between a poète maudit and a rock star. The anthology published by Rizzoli this past fall, with its endless succession of identical-size images and nearly identical looks, epitomized the consistency of the Demeulemeester vocabulary. There was all of that in today's show, held as usual in the solemn spaces of the Couvent des Cordeliers. But it was different. Evidently different. The boots were flame red, for instance, while the black was broken by sudden flashes of color. The romanticism was still present, but it got sturdier.
A little more than a year has passed since Ann left the house she built. Her lieutenant, Sébastien Meunier, took the reins, but so far he has proven to be way too faithful to the code. This season saw him breaking the mold, to his own advantage. "I am slowly starting to add my sensibility, which is very close to the one that shaped the house, but not identical," said Meunier, whose inspiration was a very personal mix of the sentimental, the pictorial, and the chaotic. By his own admission, in fact, he tried to convey the tumult of love as a feeling, slicing and cutting garments with the same resoluteness of the nouveau réaliste artist Arman, whose installations comprised accumulations of found objects carefully destroyed this way and that. Meunier's color palette was an homage to the way Vermeer played with shadow and light.
If it all sounds a tad random, it was not: Meunier's chaos was crystalline. The long silhouette had that trademark Demeulemeester flow, but what kept happening inside—the contours, with parts of the jackets going askew, insides being shown outside, zippers dangling—felt fresh. With its militaristic allure and sense of spontaneity, this collection was an interesting exercise in punk tailoring. At times Meunier got a bit carried away by the slicing fury, but all in all it was nice to finally see some movement.
