Olivier Theyskens presented his Fall collection today at Le Train Bleu, a restaurant in the Gare de Lyon that’s never been used for a fashion show before. For locals it has nostalgic associations; families of means eat there before boarding trains for South of France vacations. That jibes with what Theyskens was saying backstage about his bourgeois inspiration. Le Train Bleu also features in a crucial scene in La Femme Nikita, a 1990 Luc Besson movie about a gorgeous killer spy that made a big impact on Theyskens as a teenager.
He wove those two strands, the bourgeois and Nikita, into an unlikely whole. Long trenchcoats and tartan blazers buttoned almost to the neck mingled with little black dresses of not considerable length. What unified the collection were the tropes that Theyskens has identified as his signatures: sturdy hooks-and-eyes, bustiers, and Victorian-ish rows of covered buttons. Those elements are callbacks to his beloved early collections, when he launched his own line as a very young man before moving on to Rochas, and they appeared in his eponymous debut for Spring.
Two seasons in now, Theyskens is emerging as a resource for dresses that are body-conscious without being aggressively so. This collection had significant breadth; beyond those trenches (good) and tartan jackets (somewhat less so), there were jeans, slim cashmere sweaters, and midi skirts in the mix. Theyskens is taking this new endeavor seriously, but it could only help him to really dig deep into the category that worked here, which includes his skimming bias-cut sleeveless silk dresses and the lacy Nikita-ish LBDs. He’s also got a talent for footwear: See the pointy, mid-heeled booties with hook-and-eye detailing on the toes.
