PVC pants! Again! Down the runway they came at Barbara Bui, these shiny, black, tighter-than-tight trousers that stomped past their roomy (by comparison) leather counterparts (topstitched here in a houndstooth pattern) and bastard cousin, the reverse-skort—which has to be Bui’s most peculiar new garment, appearing to be a floor-length skirt when viewed from behind, and wide-leg trousers from the front. Why a woman would want to obscure her rear view in this, the era of all things rump-related, is anyone’s guess, but perhaps she got freaked out by Olivier Rousteing’s ode to all things hourglass at Balmain only an hour or two before. Who can say?
But those new skorts—and not being shorts, they’ll have to have another name: skants? pirts? skousers?—weren’t Bui’s sole focus at her Fall 2016 show, which skewed toward the sexy and the glam rock in equal measure. There were kelly green ponyskin shirtdresses, too; and skinny bright tartan suiting with shiny black patent accents; and a smattering of quite good shearling jackets, the exterior black leather and the lining done in emerald. One shearling-lined mink coat with a red and black intarsia houndstooth pattern on the outside was an exercise in luxurious excess; this is how Cookie from Empire would do “Brooklyn lumberjack-chic.”
There were a lot of capes, too, in another trend that seems to be sweeping through Paris. Here, some were beaded with what might have been a gilded phoenix; some were fringed in a trompe l’oeil manner to look like a different type of ensemble from a distance; some tartan coats featured slits just so that they might be worn as capes, if the feeling struck. A leather jacket basket-woven in a tartan pattern was unraveled so that the fringe was thick and layered at the hem, like a cheerleader’s pompom, while a leather car coat had pony-hair panels in an allover houndstooth print that was both winning and actually, really quite subtle.
