Instead of his usual black suit, Alber Elbaz was wearing silken prints backstage. That maybe said less about the new collection than it did his thoughts about the need to stand out in an increasingly crowded fashion environment. "How can we do a show in a digital world?" he wondered. "You have seven minutes to make it count." The solution he reached with Lucas Ossendrijver seemed to be to pack those seven minutes with as much forward-driving urgency as possible, letting the clothes flow alongside. It might only have been the New Wave-y energy of Flavien Berger's "La Fête Noire" that cued a 1980s mood, but once that idea was planted, the pushed-up sleeves, metallic animal-print accents, and oversize suits, some with paper-bag waists, pointed straight back to that decade. So did pieces—a shiny shirt, a silky baseball jacket, a big tweed coat, a drapey jacket—that recalled the '80s affection for vintage dressing. In fact, there were slicked-back moments on the Lanvin catwalk that recalled the Mudd Club, New York's early-'80s crucible of New Wave creativity.
Ossendrijver claimed the collection celebrated a renewed passion for craft and manual, artisanal attention to detail. "It's not about decoration," he said. Lanvin's decorations do indeed have a slightly haphazard quality. Is that fringe or just a lot of loose threads? Well, it's fringe, of course, and it's that sort of ambiguous touch that gives these clothes their very particular personality. Which makes them stand out, in fact.
